This event will offer simultaneous translation between Japanese and English. 
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February 7, 5-6:30 p.m. California time/ February 8, 10-11:30 a.m. Japan time

This event is part of the 2022 Japan Program Winter webinar series, The Future of Social Tech: U.S.-Japan Partnership in Advancing Technology and Innovation with Social Impact

Japan’s startup scene has become more exciting in recent years, but in the medical field, the failure to develop COVID-19 vaccines highlighted the shortcomings of Japan’s medical industry. What should Japan do to foster more impactful biotechnology entrepreneurship that would leverage vibrant medical research carried out at Japanese universities? The panel features two speakers who founded and grew their medical ventures in Japan's rapidly maturing startup ecosystem, both with deep connections to university research. 

Tadahisa Kagimoto founded his first company right after finishing his medical degree at Kyushu University, pioneering a pathway of commercializing biotechnology from Japanese university research. His second startup, Healios, founded in 2013 with the goal of becoming a pioneer in regenerative medicine utilizing iPS, was successfully listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2015 and has been growing since.

Shoko Takahashi was a PhD student in molecular bioscience at the University of Tokyo when she founded her company, Genequest, to offer home DNA testing. The firm was purchased by another biotech startup founded by a University of Tokyo graduate, Euglena, in 2017, and the company has partnered with a variety of pharmaceutical, food and beverage companies, and universities in its research. Their entrepreneurial journeys reveal Japan's changing startup ecosystem that has rapidly matured over the past decade and signal a need for further development in regulatory environments, human resource development, and university-industry collaboration in the biotechnology industry.

 

Panelists

Hardy TS Kagimoto, MD is founder, Chairman and CEO of HEALIOS K.K., a Tokyo-based, clinical-stage world leader in regenerative medicine and cell therapy. 

After founding Healios in 2011, Dr. Kagimoto led the company’s listing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2015 and has built the company to its current scale of more than 140 people across its Japan and US offices. Healios leverages the favorable Japanese regulatory framework for regenerative medicine to efficiently deliver results for patients and its stakeholders. It is currently running two pivotal clinical trials for ischemic stroke and acute respiratory distress syndrome using bone marrow-derived allogeneic multipotent adult progenitor cells. At the same time, Healios is developing best-in-class, next generation pipeline assets in immuno-oncology, ophthalmology, and organ buds utilizing its innovative, proprietary universal donor iPS cell platform.

 

Shoko Takahashi founded the Japanese personal genome company Genequest Inc. in 2013 while a graduate student at the University of Tokyo. Genequest provides a web-based personal genetic service for consumers and collaborates with research institutions in a large-scale genome research project to maximize synergistic effects between research and personal genome services. She is filled with ambition to accelerate genetic research and contribute to human health all over the world. She graduated from the University of Tokyo with a Ph.D. in Molecular Bioscience in 2015, and Kyoto University with a Bachelor of Biochemistry Science in 2010. She has been awarded the Japan Venture Award and received the highest rating by the Japan Ministry of Economy. In 2015, she was commended by the Japan Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology as one of the researchers contributing major innovations to science technologies in Japan.

She received the 2018 Young Global Leaders award from the World Economic Forum and was selected for Newsweek's ‘100 respected Japanese in the world’ list.

 

Moderator

Kenji E. Kushida is a Senior Fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He previously was with the Japan Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center as a research scholar.

Kushida’s research and projects focused on the following streams : 1) how politics and regulations shape the development and diffusion of Information Technology such as AI; 2) institutional underpinnings of the Silicon Valley ecosystem, 2) Japan's transforming political economy, 3) Japan's startup ecosystem, 4) the role of foreign multinational firms in Japan, 4) Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster. He spearheaded the Silicon Valley - New Japan project that brought together large Japanese firms and the Silicon Valley ecosystem.

He has published several books and numerous articles in each of these streams, including “The Politics of Commoditization in Global ICT Industries,” “Japan’s Startup Ecosystem,” "How Politics and Market Dynamics Trapped Innovations in Japan’s Domestic 'Galapagos' Telecommunications Sector," “Cloud Computing: From Scarcity to Abundance,” and others. His latest business book in Japanese is “The Algorithmic Revolution’s Disruption: a Silicon Valley Vantage on IoT, Fintech, Cloud, and AI” (Asahi Shimbun Shuppan 2016).

 

Sherri Rose, PhD  is an Associate Professor of Health Policy at the Stanford School of Medicine and Co-Director of the Health Policy Data Science Lab. Her research is centered on developing and integrating innovative statistical machine learning approaches to improve human health and health equity. Within health policy, Dr. Rose works on risk adjustment, ethical algorithms in health care, comparative effectiveness research, and health program evaluation. She has published interdisciplinary projects across varied outlets, including Biometrics, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of Health Economics, Health Affairs, and New England Journal of Medicine. In 2011, Dr. Rose coauthored the first book on machine learning for causal inference, with a sequel text released in 2018. She has been Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Biostatistics since 2019.

Dr. Rose has been honored with an NIH Director's New Innovator Award, the ISPOR Bernie J. O'Brien New Investigator Award, and multiple mid-career awards, including the Gertrude M. Cox Award and the Mortimer Spiegelman Award, the nation’s highest honor in biostatistics, given to a statistician younger than 40 who has made the most significant contributions to public health statistics. She was named a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2020 and received the 2021 Mortimer Spiegelman Award, which recognizes the statistician under age 40 who has made the most significant contributions to public health statistics. Her research has been featured in The New York Times, USA Today, and The Boston Globe. 

Title: New and Ongoing Projects at the Interface of Machine Learning for Health Policy

 

Title: Customer Discrimination and Quality Signals: A Field Experiment with Healthcare Shoppers

Abstract: This paper provides evidence that customer discrimination in the market for doctors can be largely accounted for by statistical discrimination. I evaluate customer preferences in the field with an online platform where cash-paying consumers can shop and book a provider for medical procedures based on an experimental paradigm called validated incentivized conjoint analysis (VIC). Customers evaluate doctor options they know to be hypothetical to be matched with a customized menu of real doctors, preserving incentives. Racial discrimination reduces patient willingness-to-pay for black and Asian providers by 12.7% and 8.7% of the average colonoscopy price respectively; customers are willing to travel 100–250 miles to see a white doctor instead of a black doctor, and somewhere between 50–100 to 100–250 miles to see a white doctor instead of an Asian doctor. Further, providing signals of provider quality reduces this willingness-to-pay racial gap by about 90%, which suggests that statistical discrimination is an important cause of the gap. Actual booking behavior allows cross-validation of incentive compatibility of stated preference elicitation via VIC. 

Alex Chan, MPH

Alex Chan is a PhD candidate in Health Economics, and a Gerhard Casper Stanford Graduate Fellow. He has research interests in health economics, experimental economics, market design, and labor economics. His projects look at the causes and consequences of discrimination and diversity in medicine, U.S. Health Policy (especially organ transplantation), and market design in health policy and medicine. He holds an MPH from Harvard University. Before Stanford, he developed extensive experience in the healthcare industry starting as a McKinsey consultant, and most recently as Senior Vice President of Market Strategy with Optum/UnitedHealth before joining academia.

Personal Website: https://www.alexchan.net 

Achyuta Adhvaryu, PhD. 

Alexander M. Nick Professor
Associate Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy
University of Michigan, Ross Schoo lof Business 

 

Stay Tuned for Details

Amanda Starc, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Strategy at the Kellogg School of Management
Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Professor Amanda Starc received her BA in Economics from Case Western Reserve University, and her PhD in Business Economics from Harvard University. Dr. Starc's research interests include industrial organization and health economics. Her research examines the Medicare Advantage, Medicare Part D, and Medicare Supplement ("Medigap") markets, as well as consumer behavior in insurance exchanges. Recent work measures the effectiveness of direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals. Her work links models of consumer choice and supply side incentives, and uses a range of econometric techniques to analyze data.

This will be an in-person event: Encina Commons, Conference Rom 119, with a boxed lunch served.

Stacie B. Dusetzina, Ph.D

Associate Professor, Health Policy
Ingram Associate Professor of Cancer Research, Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Dr. Dusetzina is an associate professor in the Department of Health Policy and an Ingram associate professor of cancer research at Vanderbilt. She is a health services researcher whose work focuses on measuring and evaluating population-level use and costs of medications in the United States. Dr. Dusetzina’s work has contributed to the evidence base for the role of drug costs on patient access to care and policy changes that might improve patient access to high-priced drugs.

She has been recognized for her work at a national level, including being an invited participant for two working group meetings on “Patient Access to Affordable Cancer Drugs,” hosted by the President’s Cancer Panel, and being selected to co-author a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine report on the same topic. Dr. Dusetzina’s research has also been broadly covered by The New York Times, NPR, Reuters, The Washington Post, STAT News, ABC News and The Wall Street Journal. 

In addition to her work on drug pricing, Dr. Dusetzina is a population health scientist and pharmacoepidemologist specializing in large data informatics. She has authored or co-authored more than 163 peer reviewed applied studies using Medicaid, Medicare, and commercial insurance claims data, and contributed several methods papers to the field. 

Seminar Title: Improving Access to Prescription Drugs through Policy Change