It gives me great honor to be a recipient of this prestigious 2021 Masao Horiba Award. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to everyone involved in this award and also my joint researchers and the staff, graduates and current students of my laboratory, who have supported me in various ways.
As an optical physicist, I started collaborative work with researchers in a different field that led to this award-winning research, the elucidation of the principle of the light-inducing acceleration system (LAC-SYS) of biochemical reactions and the research and development of “micro-flow LAC-SYS,” which enables high throughput bio-measurement. I am resolved to continuously devote my utmost efforts to allowing broad deployment of LAC-SYS primarily in medical care and pharmaceutical development settings, e.g., for the establishment of a basis for ultra-early diagnosis of cancer and infectious diseases, and in other fields, such as food inspection and environmental measurement, towards the realization of a bright future for mankind.

It is a great honor and responsibility to receive this distinguished award. This recognition was not possible without the support from my associates at the university and the fund agency, laboratory members, my coworkers at the company, academic and other sectors, professors who have always patiently guided and encouraged me, and my family. I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to them all. I shall continue to pursue my research with my team members and joint researchers, aiming to develop better life-analysis techniques than the award-winning one that can generate positive impacts on our society and the world.

It is a great honor to receive the Masao Horiba Award. I sincerely express my heartfelt gratitude to the Screening Committee and everyone who has guided and supported me.
I have committed myself to uncovering the mechanism of and investigating applications of near-infrared photoimmunotherapy (NIR-PIT), a novel attention-gaining cancer therapy. This innovative phototherapy has potential for diverse applications, such as immunotherapy for cancers, including chest malignancies. Expansions of NIR-PIT indications is also possible with the availability of new optical devices to be used with this therapy. Seeking such indication expansions, I have been working on optical device development. With the encouragement provided by the award, I shall continue with my best efforts in developing techniques useful in clinical settings through active interdisciplinary collaborations between medicine and engineering and between industries and academia.

I was given this recognition for having established a method to create a model that predicts the quality of pharmaceuticals - which is hard to measure by conventional modalities - by analyzing spectroscopically obtained data on pharmaceuticals. I am truly pleased that my commitment since my college days has borne fruit in this way. The technique that I have developed and its related techniques can contribute a great deal to improving the efficiency of pharmaceutical production processes. It is my wish that these techniques be applied in various fields and thereby contribute to making many people happy, and I look forward to the time when this wish is realized.