Hirano Toshio

Immunologist

• Born: April 17, 1947
• Place of Birth: Osaka, Japan

• Education: Osaka University
• Significance: Toshio Hirano is a researcher, career academic, and immunologist who is best known for his discovery of interleukin-6.

Background

Toshio Hirano was born in Osaka, Japan, on April 17, 1947. He grew up a sickly child—he had few friends and spent most of his time either in school or in bed. During most of Hirano’s childhood, his father, a doctor in private practice, attended to him. From that experience, watching the care and compassion of his father, Hirano knew even before he was a teenager that he would work in medicine. As a student, he excelled in the sciences. He completed his undergraduate degree in biology at Osaka University, an institution known internationally for its cutting-edge medical research facilities. Hirano loved the academic life. During his undergraduate years, he began to take better care of himself—he adopted a demanding physical exercise regimen that came to include mountain climbing.

Hirano decided to specialize in immunology, the study of how the body defends itself against invasive illness or trauma. When he completed his studies at the Graduate School of Medicine at Osaka University in 1972, he used the occasion to complete a demanding hike through the entire Southern Alps in New Zealand, a robust climb of more than 120 miles in just over twenty days. When he returned to Japan, he was at a crossroads. He loved the excitement and challenge of working in research but valued his work in the classroom. He believed that research depended on excellence in teaching. He spent time in the United States at the National Institutes of Health learning the craft of careful research.

He returned to Japan to assume a position as an assistant professor at both Osaka University and the School of Medicine at Kumamoto University. He remained at Osaka University for the next two decades. In 2008, he became the dean of its Graduate School of Medicine, and in 2011, he became the seventeenth president of Osaka University, a post he held until his retirement in 2015.

Understanding the Body’s Response to Illness

In the 1970s, Hirano researched the body’s reaction to infection by producing a fever and how inflammation itself triggered a variety of complex reactions that specifically directed the body’s efforts to minimize the impact of any invasive agents. Fever was a response to a biological crisis, and its function would promise greater assistance in understanding the evolution of disease and how the body responds to that invasion.

Hirano was interested in a range of the body’s automatic inflammation reactions (most often swellings and fever), including the body’s response to significant trauma and to second- and third-degree burns. Hirano was also interested in how inflammation factors into how the body reacts to illness, most prominently in certain cancers, diabetes, and arthritis. In addition, Hirano believed that how the body handles these invasive agents could help unlock the secrets of long-term debilitating illnesses such as Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease.

Researchers had long ago established that the body reacted clearly to each trauma without the assistance of external agents such as medications, chemicals, or surgical procedures. Indeed, these auxiliary external agents often came far into the condition’s development. But internal chemicals worked from the moment the body detected the invasion. These internal chemicals—first-line biological responders—were grouped under the umbrella term of "endogenous" chemicals. They were critical in not only handling the initial response to illness or trauma but also represented the body’s best hope for minimizing what might otherwise become a catastrophic health event. Hirano sought to find how they worked and if their impact could be contained or controlled to take advantage of the inflammation without destroying the body’s immune system.

Hirano understood the first step was to isolate and identify these critical endogenous agents. In 1988, he announced that his team had done just that—isolating and identifying an anti-inflammatory agent that he called interleukin-6, or IL-6, a fundamental agent in the body’s response to invasive injury and illness. The discovery was hailed internationally. The interleukin Hirano found was critical in mediating, even inhibiting the body’s fever symptoms, and was able to travel through the blood stream to moderate inflammation. It was, for example, the body’s first reaction to managing a simple muscle contraction during intense exercise.

The importance of IL-6 has only grown. Since Hirano’s discovery, IL-6 has emerged as a critical element with a variety of medical applications and a first-stage element of treatment when the body is responding to any acute stress. IL-6 has been linked to studies in helping patients deal with obesity, postmenopausal osteoporosis, and arthritis. More important, IL-6 has been used as a treatment protocol for controlling the onset of dementia, often the first stage of Alzheimer’s disease. By using IL-6 as part of a treatment protocol, doctors have worked to direct the aggressive development of the disease, therefore allowing the patient to function normally for a longer period of time.

Impact

For his research, Hirano has won numerous international prizes, most notably the 1986 Baelz Prize, awarded annually to outstanding theoretical and research work that involves both Japanese and German research teams, and the 2009 Crafoord Prize, awarded in different fields of scientific research by the Royal Academy of Sciences in Sweden, which annually awards the Nobel Prizes. Indeed, Crafoord winners are often considered shortlisted for future Nobel Prizes in the sciences. In 2011, Hirano was selected to receive the Japan Prize, an international award that marks outstanding scientific contributions that have had concrete and practical benefits.

Following retirement from Osaka University, he remained active in academia. He served as president of the National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology (QST). In 2019, he helped to establish the Quantum Life Science Society.

Bibliography

Hirano, Toshio. Interview. "Alumni Spotlight Special: Hirano Toshio, Osaka University President." Osaka University Prospectus, 2012. PDF file.

Hirano, Toshio. "Interview with Dr Toshio Hirano." International Immunology, vol. 33, no. 12, 2021, pp. 623-625, doi.org/10.1093/intimm/dxab084. Accessed 11 Oct. 2024.

Hirano, Toshio. "Osaka: From Suminoe-no-Tsu to the World." Osaka University, 2014, www.osaka-u.ac.jp/en/news/storyz/ou‗ogob/201406‗hirano. Accessed 11 Oct. 2024.

"Laureates of the Japan Prize: Dr. Toshio Hirano." Japan Prize Foundation, 2011, www.japanprize.jp/en/prize‗prof‗2011‗hirano.html. Accessed 11 Oct. 2024.