The First 5-year Integrated Doctoral Program Exploring the Frontiers of Pharmaceutical Sciences

To empower the next generation of students to become leaders that play active roles in various fields in society, research universities must offer attractive and meaningful doctor of philosophy (PhD) programs in their graduate schools. The Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, at Kyoto University has trained a large number of researchers who are leading drug discovery science and clinical pharmacy in academia as well as in the pharmaceutical industry, in medical organization and in government. However, due to changes in the trends of students and the evolving skill requirements of future PhD holders to handle the challenges of a changing society, it is necessary to revise the curriculum of our graduate school. Thus, we will reform the graduate and undergraduate school programs by implementing a so-called late specialization program and a double mentoring system and aim to nurture emergent researchers who will explore uncharted areas in pharmaceutical sciences. Toward this goal, we established the Division of Medical Frontier Sciences in April 2022 to replace the former Division of Bioinformatics and Chemical Genomics. This program is Japan's first five-year integrated doctoral course in the field of pharmaceutical sciences. In this review, I will introduce the background leading to its development construction and provide an overview of the characteristics of this five-year integrated doctoral program.