得意分野で研究力を伸ばし
近畿大学のブランドをさらに高める

The president, a realist, who is convinced that producing excellent doctors will be a great contribution to society.

In 2010, MATSUMURA Itaru was appointed Chair Professor of Hematology at Kindai University Faculty of Medicine.
His first impression was simple and heartfelt: “What an energetic university. The young doctors here are obedient, easy to work with, truly pure.”
From that day on, he enjoyed his new post, working side by side with the younger physicians of the hematology department in clinical practice, research, and education. The following year, in 2011, the department was renamed the Department of Hematology and Connective Tissue Diseases. Collaboration with the newly established connective tissue disease group also progressed smoothly. Around the same time, within the faculty, MATSUMURA also took on the role of Chair of the Clinical Training Committee, where he worked to improve the clinical training curriculum for medical students.
In 2014, the Faculty of Medicine established the “National Medical Examination Preparation Committee,” and MATSUMURA was assigned to oversee it. This was prompted by the fact that, in the immediately preceding 108th National Medical Examination, the pass rate among new graduates had fallen to 76.2%, ranking 79th out of 80 medical schools nationwide. That October, the position of Dean of the Faculty of Medicine was transferred from Professor KUSUNOKI to Professor IKI, and MATSUMURA also assumed the role of chair of the Academic Affairs Committee (Director of Academic Affairs).
The first thing he did was gather the thirty lowest-performing students and organize a training camp. What was remarkable was his decision to bring in instructors from a professional medical licensing examination preparatory school.
“There are students who fail because they don’t study, and there are students who study but still can’t grasp it. Each requires a different strategy,” MATSUMURA explained. “We, as university faculty, specialize in clinical practice and research—we are not professionals at licensing exam preparation. So, it is best to entrust the job to experts.”
MATSUMURA himself accompanied the students at the camp. After all, the National Medical Examination covers all clinical disciplines based on basic medical sciences, as well as social medicine. It demands broad, unbiased knowledge. To strengthen preparation, MATSUMURA revised the curriculum for sixth-year students preparing to sit the exam and added supplementary lessons. For topics less directly tied to advancement but critical for the exam, MATSUMURA personally created practice questions covering every specialty.
“Up until then, I had been asking the professors of each department to create practice questions. However, since everyone was so busy, the same kinds of questions and supplementary lectures tended to be repeated every year. As a result, students preparing for the exam simply memorized past exam questions by rote. To address this, I began writing the questions myself and then had the content checked by the respective faculty members.”
During exam season, MATSUMURA created a set of 50 questions for a single subject every week, provided explanations for them, and then prepared the next subject’s questions for the following week. “I was only sleeping two or three hours a day,” he recalls with a wry smile.
His relentless efforts paid off. By 2015, the pass rate for new graduates had improved to 88.2%, and since 2016 it has consistently remained in the 90% range.
Around this time, MATSUMURA often found himself reflecting: How many years of life had I actually been able to extend for my patients as a physician? By his own calculation, perhaps around 4,000 years in total—roughly the lifespan of fifty individuals, assuming each lived eighty years. “Even if I gave my very best, the number would be fifty or sixty, maybe seventy lives at most. The work of a single doctor has its limits. But if I train a hundred doctors, each of them will go on to save patients. Sending capable physicians out into the world is a tremendous contribution to society.”
MATSUMURA had always sought to understand what was expected of him at each stage of his career and to act accordingly. At Kindai, he came to feel that his role was less as a clinician or researcher and more as an educator, and he found real fulfillment in serving as Director of Academic Affairs.

Clinical practice and research are the two wheels” — Deeply impressed by basic medical researchers.

MATSUMURA was born in 1958 in Matsubara City, Osaka Prefecture. By his own account, he was a very quiet and gentle child. By the time he reached high school, he was considering a career either as a lawyer or as a physician. Excelling in the sciences, he chose medicine, entering Osaka University’s Faculty of Medicine.
He chose hematology as his specialty for the simple reason: “I wanted to save people whose lives were in immediate danger before my eyes.”
In hematology, physicians diagnose and treat diseases related to the blood and hematopoietic organs—the bone marrow, lymph nodes, and spleen. Among these, the most serious are the various forms of blood cancer.
“In daily practice, we deal with leukemia, malignant lymphoma, multiple myeloma. About ninety percent of the cases are malignant tumors. For cancers outside the hematopoietic system, there are treatment options such as surgery or radiation. But blood cancers are managed entirely through internal medicine, with drug therapies alone. That’s where I felt the greatest sense of purpose.”
Blood cancers have their own defining characteristics. Because they spread through the bloodstream, cancer cells can circulate throughout the entire body. Compared with solid tumors, advances in drug therapy—particularly chemotherapy—had been more pronounced. And at that time, a new option was emerging: hematopoietic stem cell transplantation—commonly known as bone marrow transplantation.
Hematopoietic stem cells are the source of blood production within the bone marrow. When a patient undergoes high-dose chemotherapy or radiation therapy aimed at eradicating cancer cells, these stem cells inevitably sustain damage as well. Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation was devised to overcome this: after treatment, the patient’s own previously harvested stem cells are returned, or compatible donor cells are transplanted, to restore the body’s ability to generate blood.
This treatment began to be actively implemented in Japan from the 1980s onward, and the Bone Marrow Bank was established in 1991 to support transplantation.
After graduating from Osaka University’s Faculty of Medicine, MATSUMURA began his clinical career in 1985 at Itami Municipal Hospital, standing on the frontlines of clinical medicine.
“One of my patients was an 18-year-old high school student with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. We began with chemotherapy and then arranged for a bone marrow transplant at Hyogo College of Medicine. Many years later , that patient came back to see me and said, ‘Thanks to you, my life was saved.’ That made me truly happy,” he recalls with a smile.
In 1988, MATSUMURA joined the Second Department of Internal Medicine at Osaka University’s Faculty of Medicine, and from 1990 he continued his research at the university’s Biomedical Research and Education Center. For an internist in a university hospital, clinical practice and research go hand in hand. He believed it was essential to gain firsthand experience in the research field. What left the deepest impression on him was witnessing the dedication of basic science researchers as they immersed themselves in their work.
“As clinicians, when we do research, we tend to think about writing papers and advancing our careers. But my mentor, Professor HIRANO Toshio, and others had an incredibly strong, pure desire to uncover the truths of natural science.”
In 1997, MATSUMURA returned to the Department of Hematology and Oncology at Osaka University’s Faculty of Medicine as a practicing clinician. Then, in 2010, he applied for a professorship at Kindai University Faculty of Medicine, driven by a desire to test his abilities at a university with a strong clinical focus.

Kindai University chooses its fields and competes on the global stage.

When MATSUMURA Itaru faced his students at Kindai University, he began to ask himself: what truly defines the qualities of a physician?
"Before the 1990s, doctors placed immense value on their own clinical experience. To exaggerate a little, if a doctor known as an authority on leukemia said, ‘This treatment is best for this patient,’ then that was accepted as the correct answer. But from the 1990s onward, the concept of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) began to take hold.”
This represented a shift from medical paternalism—where physicians made decisions to protect and control patients— to an approach rooted in EBM.
EBM rests on three pillars: first, evidence derived from clinical research; second, respect for the patient’s own values; and third, the physician’s professional expertise and experience. Even if a treatment is expected to be highly effective, if it does not align with the patient’s values, it should not be imposed. Instead, treatments should be chosen that balance evidence-based recommendations with the patient’s own values.
In this framework, even if one doctor has personally treated 100 patients with a disease, a dataset of ten thousand cases will be seen as more reliable than the doctor’s personal experience.
But here lies a problem.
"If the guidelines state, ‘This drug is recommended for this disease,’ some doctors may apply that treatment automatically, without truly considering the patient in front of them. Around 2020, however, the concept of Shared Decision-Making (SDM) began to spread in response.”
SDM is the process by which doctors and patients together make medical decisions, considering not only evidence, but also the patient’s values, lifestyle, and personal and social circumstances. It is now regarded as a foundation of EBM. In Japanese, it has been translated as “joint decision-making.”
"In line with this, medical education has recently added the goal of teaching students to ‘understand the patient in a holistic way.’ At its root is a simple but profound truth: the spirit of compassion for the patient.”
For MATSUMURA Itaru, who had devoted himself to cultivating others, becoming Dean of Kindai University Faculty of Medicine in 2018 felt almost inevitable. One of the first reforms he undertook in his new position concerned the method of selecting professors.
"The job of the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine is to raise the level of research, education, and clinical practice across the board. In collaboration with the hospital director, the dean’s most important role is to identify and appoint outstanding professors who can serve as the nucleus for elevating clinical and research standards.”
Under the previous dean, the old system of electing professors through faculty vote had already been abolished. But if there were to be no elections, MATSUMURA believed that objectivity and transparency had to be guaranteed. Professors needed to be chosen in a way that anyone could recognize as fair and beyond question.
To achieve this, he instituted a new approach: not only would positions be publicly advertised, but potential candidates from across the country would be identified and personally invited to apply through formal letters. In addition, for each relevant field, around five leading professors from outside the university were appointed as advisory members, tasked with recommending suitable candidates and evaluating the applicants themselves.
"During the evaluation process in the selection committee," MATSUMURA explained, "we no longer rely solely on the traditional impact factor. Instead, we visualize data such as citation counts, FWCI, h5-index, number of international coauthored papers, and number of top 10% cited papers—all laid out in graphs for clarity.”
It was a characteristically pragmatic idea, similar to the way he had once hired prep school lecturers for exam preparation. In time, this approach began attracting truly outstanding candidates from the outset, and during his deanship, Matsumura selected 23 full professors and two course directors.
Matsumura says the appeal of Kinki University’s Faculty of Medicine lies in its openness and strong clinical capabilities. “In oncology, for example, we rank third nationwide in the number of clinical trials for new drugs. And in research, our current dean, Dr. NISHIO Kazuto, is a leading authority in genomic medicine. For those who want to pursue research, there’s no shortage of opportunities.”
In 2022, MATSUMURA was appointed Vice President of Kindai University, and in April 2024, he assumed the presidency. “I never had any desire to become president,” he said with a wry smile. “But once I took on the role, I realized it was a fascinating job. Until then, my world had been limited to medicine and hospitals. As president, the people I meet have changed, and my world has expanded.”
Ever the realist, he is candid about the university’s ambitions. “It’s not realistic for Kindai to aim for world-class status across every faculty and discipline, like the University of Tokyo, Kyoto University, or Osaka University. But in certain fields, we can absolutely compete on the global stage—for example, our aquaculture research at the Fisheries Laboratory, or clinical medical research.”
In the end, MATSUMURA concluded that the path forward is clear: to strengthen research in areas where the university already excels, and through that, to elevate the brand of Kindai University itself.