Masayo Takahashi

President of Vision Care & Project Leader at RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology, Japan.

Prof. Takahashi, MD, Ph.D., is a world-renowned scientist whose clinical and research work has focused on ophthalmology and retinal diseases. In 2014, Prof. Takahashi and her team at the RIKEN institute in Japan succeeded in a world-first transplanting of cells made from induced pluripotent stem cells into a human body. This landmark achievement was achieved by reprogramming the patient’s own cells into iPSCs, before differentiating them into retinal pigment epithelium cells and transplanting them.

Prof. Takahashi graduated from the Faculty of Medicine at Kyoto University in 1986 and went on to receive a Ph.D. from the university in 1992. In 1995 she began post-doctoral research at the Laboratory of Genetics at the Salk Institute in California. In 2006, she became Team Leader at the Laboratory for Retinal Regeneration at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Japan, before becoming Project Leader in 2012. In 2019, she left RIKEN to become President of Vision Care, a biotech company focused on ophthalmology and regenerative medicine. In 2015, Prof. Takahashi was awarded the Ogawa-Yamanaka Prize in Stem Cell Biology.