Academic areas: Clinical Plant Science, Plant Virology.
Main research topics: Development of molecular detection of drug resistance of fungi, Utilization of plant virus vector.
Dr. Hiroshi Hamamoto studied at the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Kyushu University (1994-1998), and the Grad. Sch. of Pharm. Sci., Kyushu University (1998-2000). He belonged to the lab of microbiology and studied disinfectant-resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus. He moved to the Grad. Sch. of Pharm. Sci. at the University of Tokyo for his doctoral studies (2000-2002), during which he established a system to evaluate the quantitative therapeutic effects of antibiotics using a silkworm-based infection system. After graduation, he worked as an assistant professor at the University of Tokyo, where he researched the analysis of pharmacokinetics in silkworm (2003-2005) and the screening of the therapeutically effective antibiotics from soil bacteria culture supernatants using a silkworm bacterial infection model. From 2005 to 2008, He successfully identified a novel antibiotic, Lysocin E, by discovering antibiotics through the use of a silkworm infection model at the Genome Pharmaceuticals Institute. He then returned to the University of Tokyo as an assistant professor. He analyzed the mechanism of lysocin E (2008-2016), finding that lysocin E has a unique mode of action that is distinct from other known antibiotics. Presently, he is an associate professor at the Teikyo University Institute of Medical Mycology. He recently determined that host–microbe interaction enhances the therapeutic efficacy of lysocin E and elucidated the detailed mechanisms involved in this finding, which have been published in Nature Communications.