Department of Dermatology

 
Mailing address: kharada@yamanashi.ac.jp

General Description of the Department

The Department of Dermatology at Yamanashi University provides specialized care for patients with skin disease as well as highest level of basic and research in dermatologic science. The mission of our department is to treat patients with severe skin disease. Some of them need not only systemic therapy but also surgery. To provide care for wide spectrum of skin disease, our department includes not only specialists for dermatology but also a plastic surgeon.

Members of Faculty

Professor & Chairman
Shinji Shimada, MD, PhD
Associate Professor
Naotaka Shibagaki, MD, PhD
Lecturer
Tatsuyoshi Kawamura, MD, PhD
Kazutoshi Harada, MD, PhD
Assistant Professor
Noriko Ando, MD
Shuji Suzuki, MD
Yoichi Ogawa, MD, PhD
Rui Aoki, MD, PhD
Takashi Okamoto, MD, PhD
Resident
Miyuki Yamaguchi, MD
Daiki Nakagomi, MD
Fumie Hanawa, MD

Medical Practice

The Department of Dermatology of the University of Yamanashi Hospital provides specialized care for patients with severe skin disease as well as general skin problems. Our department offers sepicial clinic for collagen disease, psoriasis, atopic dermatitis, skin tumors, autoimmune bullous diseaes and cosmetic dermatology. For care for patients with severe skin disease, we have inpatient facility with 20 beds. Yamanashi prefecture has few hospitals where dermatologists provide medical care, thus most of severe skin diseases in Yamanashi including melanoma, pemphigus, necrotizing fasciitis, systemic burn are treated in our hospital.

General Description of Research Activities

Our research interests are mainly focused on study of the treatment of melanoma, mechanism of HIV infection and mechanism for dermatitis with associated with zinc deficiency. Because our chairman, Dr. Shimada is known as a best researcher of immunodermatology in Japan, we mainly approach these fields by immunological and molecular biological technique.

1) Prevention and treatment of melanoma and lymphoma by polyarginine-mediated protein delivery (Dr. Shibagaki lab):
Polyarginine conjugated proteins are transduced to many kinds of cell with no toxicity. Dr. Shibagaki and collegues introduced some proteins involved signal transduction pathway or tumor antigen into tumor cells and initiated anti-tumor immunity and induced the arrest of tumor growth. They have succeeded in rejecting some kinds of tumors implanted into immunodeficiency mice. These results have been published in international academic journals.

2) The role of Langerhans cells in the sexual transmission of HIV (Kawamura lab):
Langerhans cell (LC) is a specialized antigen-presenting cell in epidermis. LCs participate in immune response in the skin. Dr. Kawamura showed that LCs are initial cellular targets in the sexual transmission of HIV. Moreover he and collegues discovered that HIV transmission was accelerated by infection of microorganisms in LC via up-regulation of CD4 and down-regulation of Apobec family enzymes on LC. These finding have been published in high impact journals.

3) Elucidation of underlying mechanisms of dermatitis with associated with zinc deficiency (Kawamura lab):
Zinc is an essential element in human and deficiency of this element causes many disorders including dermatitis. Although acrodermatitis enteropathica has been recognized as dermatitis due to zinc, the molecular mechanism of this disease is not well understood. We are investigating the relationship between zinc deficiency and dermatitis using model mice and immunological methods.