{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02769110764430577, 'fraction_numerical': 0.01326053042121685, 'mean_word_length': 5.286764705882353, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The Journal of Gene Medicine 2001 Young Investigator Award

At this year’s Japan Society of Gene Therapy (JSGT) meeting, The Journal of Gene Medicine Young Investigator Award was presented to Dr Hiroyuki Nakai from Stanford University for his work on two novel strategies to overcome the limited packaging size of current rAAV vectors. Dr Hiroyuki Nakai received his MD at Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine (KPUM), Japan, in 1987 and in 1990 he joined the Hematology Laboratory of the Third Department of Internal Medicine at KPUM, where he started his research career as a graduate student in the field of molecular cytogenetics of hematological malignancies. Dr Nakai received his PhD in 1994 from KPUM, where he contributed to the elucidation of the genetic changes responsible for the disease progression of chronic myelogenous leukemia and myelodysplastic syndrome, and published or co-authored 18 research articles in international scientific journals. After working as Assistant Director of the Department of Medicine, Otsu Municipal Hospital, Japan, for 2 years, Dr Nakai started his post-doctoral research on recombinant adeno-associated virus (rAAV) vectors at the University of Southern California (USC) and Avigen Inc. in the United States in 1996. Under the direction of Drs Gary Kurtzman (Avigen), Linda Couto (Avigen), and Yuichi Iwaki (USC), Dr Nakai studied rAAV vectors expressing human coagulation factor IX (hF.IX) for muscleand liver-directed gene therapy of hemophilia B [1]. In 1998, Dr Nakai was recruited by Dr Mark Kay, Director of Program in Human Gene Therapy, Departments of Pediatrics and Genetics, Stanford University, to explore further liver-directed rAAV-mediated gene transfer. Dr Nakai serves as a senior post-doc at Dr Kay’s laboratory and his interest has focused on the elucidation of the mechanisms of rAAV vector transduction in hepatocytes in vivo. He is using this information to develop better AAVand non-viral-based vectors. He has contributed to important pre-clinical data that were used to support an upcoming clinical trial for treating severe hemophilia B with liver-directed rAAV-mediated gene transfer. He has published a series of research articles [2–6], and received an Outstanding Research Award from the American Society of Gene Therapy (ASGT) in 2000 for his presentation at the Third Annual Meeting entitled ‘Annealing of complementary single-stranded genomes and subsequent intermolecular joining is the mechanism of stable in vivo liver transduction by recombinant adenoassociated virus vectors’.