Ever since pioneering reports introduced mouse 1 and humaninduced 2-4 pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to the scientific community and the populace at large, there has been an increasing interest in applications for their use in the fields of biomedical research. These include cell therapy in regenerative medicine and modeling of human disease.

Several authors have reported a case of chronic pancreatitis associated with Sjögren's syndrome in which an autoimmune mechanism may have been involved in the etiology and in which steroid therapy was effective. We recently encountered a patient with pancreatitis who had hyperglobulinemia, was autoantibody-positive, and responded to steroid therapy. This patient, however, failed to show any evidence of association with Sjögren's syndrome or other collagen diseases. Although the concept of autoimmune hepatitis and the criteria for diagnosing it have been established, autoimmune pancreatitis has not yet been defined as a clinical entity. We report a case of chronic pancreatitis in which an autoimmune mechanism is involved in the etiology and summarize the cases of pancreatitis suspected of being caused by an autoimmune mechanism in the Japanese and English literature.

The coupling of a quantum dot with a BCS-type superconducting reservoir results in an intriguing system where low energy physics is governed by the interplay of two distinct phases, singlet and doublet. In this Letter we show that the spectrum of Andreev energy levels, which capture the properties of the two phases, can be detected in transport measurements with a quantum dot strongly coupled to a superconducting lead and weakly coupled to a normal metal lead. We observe phase transitions between BCS singlet and degenerate magnetic doublet states when the quantum dot chemical potential is tuned with an electrostatic gate, in good qualitative agreement with numerical renormalization group calculations.

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Induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived dopaminergic (DA) neurons are an expected source for cell-based therapies for Parkinson’s disease (PD). The regulatory criteria for the clinical application of these therapies, however, have not been established. Here we show the results of our pre-clinical study, in which we evaluate the safety and efficacy of dopaminergic progenitors (DAPs) derived from a clinical-grade human iPSC line. We confirm the characteristics of DAPs by in vitro analyses. We also verify that the DAP population include no residual undifferentiated iPSCs or early neural stem cells and have no genetic aberration in cancer-related genes. Furthermore, in vivo studies using immunodeficient mice reveal no tumorigenicity or toxicity of the cells. When the DAPs are transplanted into the striatum of 6-OHDA-lesioned rats, the animals show behavioral improvement. Based on these results, we started a clinical trial to treat PD patients in 2018.