Yuta Kunishima | Researcher
The Research Foundation for Microbial Diseases of Osaka University

Yuta Kunishima is a researcher at The Research Foundation for Microbial Diseases of Osaka University (BIKEN). BIKEN is a leading vaccine manufacturer in Japan, producing the largest number of vaccine products in the country, including influenza, measles, rubella, Japanese encephalitis, and varicella–zoster vaccine. BIKEN continues to focus on the research and development of novel vaccines, including intranasal influenza vaccine, live-attenuated SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, pneumococcal vaccine, chikungunya vaccine, and next-generation vaccines for pathogens that may cause future outbreaks. In 2022, Yuta Kunishima initiated fundamental research on EV-D68 vaccines at BIKEN Innovative Vaccine Research Alliance Laboratories, a joint research initiative of BIKEN and Research Institute for Microbial Diseases (RIMD) at The University of Osaka—one of Japan’s premier institutes for microbiology. Through his research, he has acquired expertise across diverse vaccine modalities and has contributed to the research of multiple vaccine platforms against EV-D68, including inactivated whole-virion vaccines (Senpuku et al., Vaccine, 2024; Senpuku et al., Vaccine, 2025), mRNA vaccines (Kunishima et al., Molecular Therapy – Nucleic Acids, 2025; Kunishima et al., in revision), and virus-like particle (VLP) vaccines (Senpuku et al., Molecular Therapy – Nucleic Acids, 2026). Currently, he serves as the project leader for the EV-D68 vaccine R&D program at BIKEN, where he is in charge of pharmacological and efficacy studies of vaccine candidates. In his presentation, he provides an overview of BIKEN’s vaccine research on EV-D68. The presentation introduces an inactivated whole-virion vaccine candidate that can induce neutralizing antibodies against a broad range of clades. In addition, it can be propagated in Vero cells, which are widely used in vaccine production.