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Departments, Offices, and Branch Laboratory
Departments, Offices, and Branch Laboratory
Department of Environmental Health and Toxicology
| The mission of the Division of Environmental Health is to ensure the safety of the outdoor and indoor environments. Environmental pollutants derived from vehicles such as suspended particle matter and nitric oxide are examined and biological effects of diesel exhaust are investigated using experimental animals. In addition, the quantities of dust falls in Tokyo area are measured. As for the indoor environment, harmful chemical substances including dioxins, lights, noises, bacteria, molds, and mites are examined. The endocrine disrupting effects of environmental pollutants are investigated in in vitro and in vivo experiments. Furthermore, the harmful chemical substances in fish and shellfish in Tokyo Bay are measured for the survey of pollution in Tokyo Bay in collaboration with the Division of Water Environment and Division of Quasi-Drugs and Chemical Safety Investigation. |  |
The Division of Drugs conducts examinations on prescription and non-prescription drugs, hospital preparations, IVD (In Vitro Diagnostics), crude drugs, and medicinal herbal products. The Department contributes to ensure drugs are of the highest quality by sending staff members to accompany inspectors on GMP (Good Manufacturing Practices) inspections, providing technical advice on manufacturing and quality control. In addition, it is conducting examinations on interim products and final products. It also examines for the presence of drug ingredients or narcotic ingredients in health foods or so-called law-evading drugs. It is in charge of the testing of cyanide in wastewater of galvanizing and metal processing factories. The Medicinal Plant Garden in Kodaira cultivates poppy, hemp, narcotic-source plants, poisonous herbs, and different types of medicinal plants, provides training and guidance to Pharmaceutical Affairs inspectors, medical students, and pharmaceutical students, educates the Tokyo public on medicinal plants, and conducts plant differentiation examinations.
The Division of Water Environment conducts examinations and researches to ensure the safety of the water environment. The Water Chemistry Section is engaged in testing on the items of water quality standards for drinking water, raw water, tank water in buildings and waste water from offices. Water quality of outer moats of the Imperial Palace and radioactivity in the environment are examined as requested by the National Government. Highly sensitive and efficient analytical methods are developed and applied to the surveilance of harmful chemical substances such as endocrine disrupting chemicals and pesticide residues in river and drinking water. In the Water Microbiology Section, major tasks are the examination of Legionella present in the living environment, Cryptosporidium, Guardia, coli form bacteria and other types of aquatic microbes in drinking water and raw water. The attempts to develop the methods for rapid and accurate detection of microbes are performed.
The Division of Pharmacology and Division of Pathology are engaged in research to collect the scientific data for safety and risk assessment of chemical substances in humans.
In the Division of Pharmacology, the pharmacological and biochemical effects of a wide variety of chemical substances such as pesticide residues, food additives, drugs, and environmental pollutants are studied in terms of functional changes in living systems using cells, tissues and whole animals. General toxicity, endocrine disrupting effects, carcinogenicity, teratogenicity, genotoxicity, and metabolic effects of these chemical substances are investigated.
In the Division of Pathology, the biological influences of chemical substances on the organs and tissues of experimental animals are morphologically investigated using the pathological techniques. The research on the safety of genetically modified food has been a recent subject in long-term animal study. Online computer system has been used for the care and management of experimental animals and also for the record and analysis of the experimental data.
| [Relationship with Tokyo citizens] The Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences examines the quality of drugs, quasi-drugs, and cosmetics sampled from all around Tokyo, educates the Tokyo public on medicinal plants at the Medicinal Plant Garden, and contributes to prevent health damages.
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