Greeting

Dear colleagues,

It is with great pleasure that we invite you to the 1st Annual Meeting of the Japanese Cytokine Society (JCS2024), which will be held in Sapporo on July 25 and 26, 2024.

The JCS was established in FY2023 through the merger of two academic societies: the Japanese Society for Interferon and Cytokine Research (JSICR) and the Japanese Society of Molecular Cell Biology of Macrophages (MMCB). These two societies were closely related in terms of mutual personnel exchange and research targets in the academic field of immunology. JCS2024 will be the first academic conference after their merger.

JCS2024 will invite up-and-coming researchers, including young and female researchers from Japan and abroad, under the theme "Cytokine Physiology and Pathology" and provide a forum to discuss cutting-edge topics covering basic to clinical aspects, including T-cell biology, vaccines, nucleic acid-mediated immune regulation, gut immunity, autoimmune diseases, and osteoimmunology.

For the first conference, we will welcome Dr. Tadamitsu Kishimoto (Osaka University), who was involved in the discovery of IL-6 and its clinical application, and Dr. Tadatsugu Taniguchi (University of Tokyo), who discovered interferon-β and IL-2 and elucidated their mechanisms of action and roles in the immune system, as keynote speakers. In addition, there will be six sessions (organizers: Drs. Akihiko Yoshimura, Ken J Ishii, Osamu Takeuchi, Kiyoshi Takeda, Keishi Fujio, and Hiroshi Takayanagi), oral and poster sessions, and lunch seminars organized by industry to provide opportunities to discuss cutting-edge research on an international exchange basis.

In addition to providing a forum for international exchange and awards for young researchers, JCS2024 will also serve as a foothold for collaborative research between researchers involved in immunology and is expected to develop trends on cytokine research in Japan for the world.

Cytokine research is one of Japan's leading research fields, with a very high global contribution, and this conference is at the center of cytokine research in Japan and abroad. Japan also made significant contributions to research on the mechanism of action of cytokine storms associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and on the clinical application of mRNA vaccines, the subject of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

We look forward to your participation.

Sincerely yours,
Chairs, JCS2024

Masaaki Murakami, V.M.D., Ph.D. Division of Molecular Psychoneuroimmunology, Institute for Genetic Medicine, Hokkaido University	Ken J Ishii, M.D., Ph.D. Division of Vaccine Science, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, The Institute of Medical Science, The University of Tokyo