Search

The revised model/core curriculum for pharmaceutical education in Japan was introduced in 2015. The need to provide ethics education, which includes research integrity for pharmacists and those conducting pharmaceutical research, was clearly described in the document: "G: pharmaceutical research (2) rule of law and ethics essential for research activity." Additionally, this newly introduced model/core curriculum was officially requested within each pharmaceutical university. As recently as 2014, a severe situation was exposed in the field of life sciences and clinical research: many reports emerged about scientific misconduct in Japan. The members of Kyoto Pharmaceutical University were deeply concerned about this situation and thus decided that our guidelines of action for research integrity would be approached as follows: All members of Kyoto Pharmaceutical University would individually rethink the university's research integrity and ethics with a strong sense of ownership and importance, discuss concrete countermeasures and future plans to establish our university's research integrity, and collectively implement these strategies through education programs. In this review, we introduce several examples of educational activities undertaken by our university, and use them as a basis for discussing how we should address research integrity and the responsible conduct of research in education for academics, graduate students, and undergraduates.

In recent years, people all over the world have suffered from various diseases such as cancer, myocardial infarction, osteoporosis, hypertension, and diabetes mellitus (DM). Especially, DM, well-known as one of lifestyle-related diseases, has been regarded as a serious problem, because it is difficult to fully recover. The number of patients suffering from DM in 2007 was reported to be approximately 200 million people worldwide. However, insulin preparations and synthetic therapeutics, which are clinically used treatment of DM, have been associated with problems such as physical and mental pain due to daily injections and certain severe side effects, respectively. Zn, which is an essential trace element in animals and humans and plays an important role in maintenance of their lives, has been indicated to exhibit insulin-like activity. Since the finding of insulin-like effects of Zn, several Zn complexes have been proposed as a new type of anti-diabetic therapeutics which is differ from existing medicines. In this symposium, we introduce the anti-diabetic effect, complication relieving effect, and action mechanism of bis(2-mercaptopyridine-N-oxidato)Zn complex with Zn(S(2)O(2)) coordination mode.

Simultaneous and fractional determination of iron(II) and iron(III) was accomplished with o-hydroxyhydroquinonephthalein (QP) in the presence of poly (N-vinyl pyrrolidone). In the determination of total iron (iron(II)+iron(III)), Beer's law was obeyed in the range of 0.02-0.67 μg·ml(-1), with an effective molar absorptivity (at 570 nm) and a relative standard deviation of 1.30×10(5)·l·mol(-1)·cm(-1) and 0.77% (n = 8), respectively. This method was about 10-15 times and more than the methods using 1,10-phenanthroline and 2,2'-bipyridine. In addition, the iron-QP complex was characterized using spectrophotometry and the electron spin resonance. This method was successfully applied to assays of total iron and iron(III) in pharmaceutical preparations.