Koichi Mizutome, president of the Food & Life Companies Ltd., which operates the conveyor belt sushi chain Sushiro, has indicated a positive attitude toward the introduction of genome editing as a technology that should be expanded in the future. The company has formed a capital partnership with Regional Fish Institute, Ltd., which manufactures and sells genome-edited fish, and is also working with Platinum Bio (PtBio), a venture company that promotes genome-editing technology, to develop new fish. However, he noted that as social consensus regarding this technology must firstly be achieved, it will not be introduced anytime soon.
(Asahi Shimbun Digital Edition 2024/6/19)

On May 30, the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Technology Council of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries held a public-private partnership review meeting to discuss the commercialization of cedar pollen allergy-alleviating rice and presented an interim report. Among others, it was proposed that the government and private sectors should work together to solve problems, that it would be desirable to extract the active ingredient and sell it as a pharmaceutical rather than eat it as rice, and that it was necessary to differentiate the resulting pharmaceutical from existing treatments.

A research team led by Yoshizaki Goro, a professor in the Department of Marine Biological Resources at the Graduate School of Science at Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology, which is developing surrogate parent fish by xenotransplantation of germ stem cells, has announced that they have succeeded in having rainbow trout lay salmon eggs. Many salmon species die after spawning, but rainbow trout can spawn repeatedly because they do not die. In the xenotransplant developed by the university, cells from male and female salmon germ cells are transplanted into male and female rainbow trout, respectively. The fish produce salmon sperm and ova, which are fertilized. The research team is now using the same principle to produce tuna.
(Science Advances 2024/5/24)

KOSÉ announced on May 8 that it would partner with I Peace, Inc. in the United States to offer personal beauty products using iPS cells. The company will offer a beauty service by creating iPS cells from a customer's blood to extract active ingredients, which are mixed with other ingredients to create a beauty serum, and combining this with skin diagnostics. The company plans to conduct demonstration trials and to start offering products by 2026. KOSÉ plans to offer six bottles of beauty serum at under 120,000 yen per bottle, totaling around 1 million yen per year with diagnosis. Kao already offers beauty programs based on RNA analysis, and Shiseido has started a gbeauty DNA programh using DNA extracted from saliva. The development of cosmetics has now entered an era of individualized treatment based on genes and iPS cells.
(Nikkei Biotech Online Edition 2024/5/13)