Research Director, Professor Emeritus Tetsuya Terasaki from UEF’s School of Pharmacy is the laureate of Ariëns Award 2023. He was awarded at the FIGON Dutch Medicine days where he gave his award lecture entitled “Pharmacoproteomics of the Brain Barriers”. Professor Terasaki is the first researcher both from Finland and Japan to receive the award.
Tetsuya Terasaki is Research Director of Bioanalytics at the School of Pharmacy, University of Eastern Finland (UEF), and Professor Emeritus of Tohoku University (TU), Japan. At Tohuku University, he was appointed Professor in 1996 and Distinguished Professor in 2008. In 2020 he retired from TU and moved to UEF to continue his research in Finland. He is a member of GeneCellNano Research Flagship and UEF’s DrugTech Research Community.
In his research, Professor Terasaki has focused on developing new methodology to address difficult and challenging questions. A major focus of his research has been to clarify transport function of drugs and endogenous compounds in the central nervous system barriers, including ocular barriers. In 2008, he developed a novel methodology to quantify membrane proteins based on an in silico peptide selection criteria for the target proteomics. He has opened a new research field of pharmacoproteomics, defined by quantitative proteomics-based pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, toxicokinetics, clinical pharmacology and therapeutics, which is expected to play an important role in the progress of the pharmaceutical and biomedical sciences in the next decade.
He has been serving as an editor of Journal of Pharmaceutical Science since 2008 and has published over 330 research articles, 30 review articles and book chapters. He received the Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon, bestowed by the Government of Japan in 2013. He was selected as a “Highly Cited Researcher 2016” in Pharmacology & Toxicology by Clarivate Analytics.
In his Ariëns lecture, Professor Terasaki showed how the membrane protein quantification is useful in the prediction of unbound drug concentration in the brain and the understanding of receptor-mediated drug effect.
The Ariëns lecture is an annual event at the FIGON Dutch Medicine days, organized by the Dutch Pharmacological Society since 1984. This lecture is named after the famous Dutch pharmacologist Prof. Dr. E. J. Ariëns (1918-2002). Ariëns lecturers are eminent pharmacologists with a strong international orientation and a focus on molecular pharmacology.
