Kitasato

The firm has been working with Kitasato University, a medical university in Tokyo.

“It is inappropriate to push vaccinations to hold the Olympics,” said Dr. Tetsuo Nakayama, a professor at Kitasato Institute for Life Sciences.

It was not until the 1890s, when Emil von Behring and Kitasato Shibasaburo developed antitoxins — convalescent plasma — to treat diphtheria and tetanus that the public embraced the germ theory.

Antibodies were discovered in 1890 by the physiologist Emil von Behring and the microbiologist Shibasaburo Kitasato as protective antitoxins in the blood of animals exposed to diphtheria or tetanus toxin2.

Monoclonal antibodies are also being developed to control infectious diseases — following the concept of protective antibodies that goes back to von Behring and Kitasato.