Greeting from the 20th president

Jan 1, 2018

Greetings:

My name is Professor Masashi Watanabe of Toho University in Japan and this is to inform you that I became the president of International Society of Cryosurgery (ISC) after Professor Haruo Isoda. Although I am a surgeon specialized in hepatobiliary-pancreatic surgery, but also have been studying Cryosurgery for 36 years since I became a medical doctor. I have participated in the conference 7 times so far, started from the 9th Conference (Paris, 1995) up to the 19th conference (Kaunas, Lithuania, 2017). In Kaunas, I have presented 2 subjects on behalf of my former teacher Professor Saijo Sumida who were under medical treatment at the time. My term as the president will be from January 2018 to December 2019 as making my best effort to focus on a further development of Cryosurgery. So I will be grateful if you provide us your continued kind cooperation from now on.

Cryosurgery is a historic treatment, and I consider that the treatment currently receives favorable conditions due to the usage of immune checkpoint inhibitor as an available option. In order to obtain a treatment effect by cancer immunotherapy such as immune checkpoint inhibitor, it is required to have T-cell response against endogenous tumor antigen including different mutation-derived antigens by clinical case. It is assumed that cryosurgery can be superior as an immune presentation method for endogenous tumor antigen. In a possible condition of clinical application, when I performed cryotherapy for tumor site once a week or once every two weeks, I also injected immune checkpoint inhibitor at the time. So I consider that this will become a new way of cancer treatment in future.

The 20th ISC Conference will be held in Haifa, Israel in Autumn 2019 with Professor Yaron Har-Shai as a congress president. Cryotherapy for keloid formation proposed by Professor Yaron definitely indicates the excellent treatment outcomes, and I believe that the treatment will provide us so many insights in terms of tissue destruction and regeneration or regeneration signal and repair-related cells. The research that Professor Sajio Sumida was working on before he passed away was a research for adipose tissue-derived mesenchymal stem cell. I consider that the cell may possibly be involved with immunity and repair in a local site environment at the time of cryosurgery since it can resist a condition with a low temperature/oxygen or generate various differentiations.

While I certainly would like to assist Professor Yaron Har-Shai for making the 20th ISC conference (Haifa, Israel) successful, I also would like to encourage the members to smoothly facilitate and activate their activities. Yet, to begin with, I need to take over the operations from Professor Haruo Isoda of Nagoya University such as homepage management for the members and collection of membership fee.

Best regards

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  • Masashi Watanabe
  • The 20th President of the International Society of Cryosurgery
  • The Chairman of the Japanese Society of Low temperature medicine
  • The president of Asian Society of Cryosurgery
  • Professor Department of Patient Safety & Risk Management
  •  Toho University Medical Center Omori Hospital
  •   The Head Office of International Society of Cryosurgery
  •   Toho University Omori Medical Center
    Clinical research buildingⅡ-311, Cryo Research Room
    6-11-1, Omori-nishi, Ota-ku, Tokyo 143-8541 JAPAN
  • Phone 81-3-3762-4151 ext.3571 FAX 81-3-3768-3620
  • email
  • http://is-cryosurgery.com/

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