The 144th Annual Meeting of the Pharmaceutical Society of Japan (Yokohama)

Organizer: Hiroyuki Kawagishi (Natl. Inst. Health Sci.), Yasunari Kanda (Natl. Inst. Health Sci.)

It is imperative for our country, which is experiencing a serious decline in birthrate and an aging population, to prioritize saving as many newborns' lives as possible. With this context, Japanese government emphasized the importance of developing therapeutic drugs for children in the Basic Policy on Economic and Fiscal Management and Reform 2023. However, numerous difficulties hinder the development of pediatric drugs, including limited participants for clinical trials, and their variation of etiologies and backgrounds. Moreover, it is important but challenging to assess efficacy and safety considering the developmental stages. Hence, further basic and clinical research as well as academic-government-industry cooperation are needed to increase the availability of pediatric drugs. This symposium aims to present research on therapeutics for fetal and infant heart failure, pediatric patient-friendly drug design, and key considerations for conducting clinical trials in pediatric rare diseases. Our goal is to facilitate discussion on expanding the bench-to-bedside research, fostering the launch of innovative pediatric drugs by sharing recent insights from basic, clinical, and regulatory sciences.