At the Heart of the Kobe Biomedical Innovation Cluster, A Creator of Japan’s future
The Kobe Biomedical Innovation Cluster (KBIC) started as a project to reconstruct Kobe’s economy devastated by the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, to protect Kobe citizen’s lives and to contribute to the health and welfare of all mankind. The Foundation for Biomedical Research and Innovation was established in March 2000 as the core organization promoting the KBIC with Hiroo Imura as the first president, and, in 2018, under the second president, Tasuku Honjo, the foundation was developed and reorganized into the Foundation for Biomedical Research and Innovation at Kobe (FBRI). During these periods, the KBIC has developed remarkably and grown into the largest biomedical life-science cluster in Japan – it is now a home to over 360 companies and organizations, including highly advanced medical institutions, and more than 12,000 people are working there. As the core organization, the FBRI vigorously promotes joint projects and facilitates various forms of collaboration among industrial, government, academic and medical institutions in the KBIC.
Japan has become an aging society with a declining birth rate ahead of other countries and faces a variety of medical challenges. We also have the devastation caused by COVID-19 still fresh in our memory. It is our vital mission to offer the solutions to these medical problems and extend people’s healthy life expectancy. Medicine has evolved to the point where basic science and clinical practice fuse together to elucidate the biological structure of human diseases. In the KBIC, the foundations for such endeavors such as basic and clinical sciences and translational research as well as computational science, are already being developed, and a group of companies in related fields also accumulate.
The FBRI will work harder than ever to link and integrate these activities in the KBIC, and promote synergies among them to create new industries and bring the fruits back into real-world medical care. With these efforts we will fulfill the trust by the city of Kobe and its citizens, and disseminate the message from Kobe to the world for realizing a strong, resilient society where people can enjoy good health and longevity.
We greatly appreciate your continued warm support and cooperation.
