Message from the President

I’m Yoriko Watanabe from Kurume University. It is my great honor to be appointed President for the 66th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society for Inherited Metabolic Diseases and the 21st Asian Symposium of Inherited Metabolic Diseases. Dr. Junko Matsuda of Kawasaki Medical School will serve as Vice President. This academic event will take place for three days from Thursday, October 15 to Saturday, October 17, 2026 at the Fukuoka International Congress Center. For the event, I will be away from Kurume and welcome you all to Fukuoka.

The Japanese Society for Inherited Metabolic Diseases was founded in March 1965 as the Pediatric Metabolism Research Society with the first President being Prof. Toshio Takai of the Department of Pediatrics, School of Medicine, Osaka City University. Dr. Takai also served as the third head professor of the Department of Pediatrics at Kurume University, and I feel a deep connection to him. Afterwards, the presidencies of the 16th research meeting of the Pediatric Metabolism Research Society and the 44th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society for Inherited Metabolic Diseases, both held in the City of Kurume, were assumed by Dr. Fumio Yamashita and Dr. Makoto Yoshino of Kurume University, respectively. To carry on this tradition, I have taken on the presidency of this year’s event. I am truly grateful for being granted this opportunity and feel humbled.

The theme of this year’s academic event is "To Connect, To Belong, To Move Forward Together." This phrase represents our determination to connect diverse fields, such as medical professionals and patients, pediatrics and other medical departments, clinical practice and research, administration and medicine, and the old and the new, to belong to one another, and to move forward together into a new future. We also believe that our important missions to fulfill through the event include passing on knowledge and experience to the next generation and ensuring that such assets will contribute to the development of future research and medical practice. We sincerely look forward to seeing the moments when new doors will open one after another through encounters and discussions at this academic event. We sincerely hope that you will join us. See you in Fukuoka!

October 2025

66th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society for Inherited Metabolic Diseases
21st Asian Symposium of Inherited Metabolic Diseases
Yoriko Watanabe, President
Research Institute of Medical Mass Spectrometry and Department of Pediatrics, Kurume University School of Medicine

Junko Matsuda, Vice President
Department of Pathophysiology and Metabolism, Kawasaki Medical School