Tetsuro Matano

Tetsuro Matano worked as an orthopaedic surgeon for five years after graduating from the Faculty of Medicine, University of Tokyo, Japan. He then started basic research on retrovirology and obtained his Doctor of Medical Sciences degree from the university’s Graduate School of Medicine. He began his study of AIDS pathogenesis using monkey AIDS models at NIAID, NIH, and reported crucial evidence indicating the importance of CD8+ T-cell responses in immunodeficiency virus control. He was appointed as a Professor at the Institute of Medical Science, University of Tokyo, in 2006 (-present), Director of the AIDS Research Center (ARC) at the National Institute of Infectious Diseases (NIID) in Tokyo in 2010 (-2024), and Deputy Director-General of NIID in 2022 (-present). He is now strengthening research and development and international collaboration as the chair of the R&D Strategy Committee at NIID.

Tetsuro has been working on HIV-specific immune responses in macaque AIDS models and people living with HIV. He established a unique AIDS model using MHC-defined rhesus macaques for analysis of SIV-specific T-cell responses and demonstrated that Gag-specific CD8+ T-cell induction can result in the control of a pathogenic SIV challenge. His group found that neutralizing antibodies (NAbs) can enhance antigen presentation by increasing Fc-mediated uptake of NAb-bound virions into dendritic cells, resulting in augmentation of T-cell responses, which has been highlighted as a possible mechanism for viral control by therapies using broadly reactive NAbs. He has also been working on HIV vaccines and developed a delivery system using Sendai virus vectors; Phase I of a clinical trial in Rwanda, Kenya and the UK, in collaboration with IAVI, confirmed its safety and immunogenicity. He has designed a novel immunogen selectively inducing Gag/Vif-specific CD8+ T-cell responses and demonstrated Env-independent protection against intrarectal SIV challenge in macaques. He is now working on virus-host immune interaction, microbiomes and development of vaccines against HIV-1, HTLV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Tetsuro has been involved in facilitating interaction among basic scientists, clinicians and social communities. His groups in ARC have contributed to the preparation of annual reports on national HIV and AIDS surveillance and reference services for laboratory tests and diagnosis, and have led projects for HIV genome and drug-resistance surveillance and estimation of HIV incidence. ARC has been organizing annual training courses with the Japan International Cooperation Agency for Asian, African and South American technicians and researchers (there are more than 300 participants from more than 60 countries) to strengthen laboratory techniques and surveillance systems for global control of HIV and related infectious diseases since 1993. Many young researchers from Asian and African countries have learned science and techniques and obtained PhDs in his laboratory.

He has been working on analyses of viral genomes, MHC-I genotypes and microbiomes in people living with HIV in collaboration with Asian and African countries. He was a co-chair of the AIDS Panel in the US-Japan Cooperative Medical Science Program from 2014 to 2023. He leads a project for the establishment of Asian laboratory networks for the control of infectious diseases.