Yasuhiro Kodera, Director National Hospital Organization, Nagoya Medical Center, Nagoya, Japan

  1985 M.D. Nagoya University, School of Medicine

  1990          Completed a 3-months training course at National Cancer Center, Tokyo

  1994 PhD     Nagoya University, School of Medicine

[HOSPITAL APPOINTMENTS]

  1986/5-1991/3 Staff Surgeon, Komaki Municipal Hospital, Aichi, Japan

1991/4-1994/5         Research Fellow, Department of Surgery II

        Nagoya University School of Medicine

1994/6-2001/12 Consulting Surgeon, Department of Gastroenterological Surgery,

        Aichi Cancer Center, Aichi, Japan

2002/1-2004/9 Research Associate, Department of Gastroenterological Surgery

        Nagoya University, Graduate School of Medicine

2004/10-2007/12 Assistant Professor, Department of Gastroenterological Surgery

        Nagoya University, Graduate School of Medicine

2008/1-2011/7 Associate Professor, Department of Gastroenterological Surgery

        Nagoya University, Graduate School of Medicine

2011/8-2024/3         Professor and Chairman, Department of Gastroenterological Surgery

        Nagoya University, Graduate School of Medicine

2016/4-2019/3 Vice Director, Nagoya University Hospital

2019/4-2024/3         Director, Nagoya University Hospital

2024/4-               Director, National Hospital Organization Nagoya Medical Center

[SPECIAL NOTE]

President of the Annual Congress 2024

Japan Surgical Society

Board of Directors Japanese Gastric Cancer Association

Japanese Society for Gastroenterological Carcinogenesis

Council Member         International Gastric Cancer Association

Board Certified Member The Japanese Society of Gastroenterological Surgery

The Japanese Society of Gastroenterology

Editor-in-Chief Gastric Cancer (2019-)

 [SHORT BIO]

A gastrointestinal surgeon with chief interest in gastric cancer surgery since his professional

appointment at Aichi Cancer Center in 1994.

An editorial board member of the journal Gastric Cancer since 2000 and became the Editor-in-

Chief in 2019.

Appointed a professor of the Department of Gastroenterological Surgery at Nagoya University

Graduate School of Medicine in 2011.

Joined the board of directors for Japanese Gastric Cancer Association in 2014, and was appointed a chairman of the board of directors in 2018.

Joined the board of directors for Japan Surgical Society in 2016, and was elected as a President

of the Annual Congress in 2024.

An author of more than 640 peer-reviewed articles on surgery and surgical oncology including 73 articles as a first author, almost exclusively on gastric cancer.

His current concerns are the hospital management as a director of Nagoya Medical Center

at the post-pandemic era.

Summary of presentation
The journal Gastric Cancer is an official journal of the International Gastric Cancer Association (IGCA) and the Japanese Gastric Cancer Association (JGCA). The first volume was published in 1998, the year when JGCA was founded, with Prof. J. Rudiger Siewert as the editor-in-chief from the IGCA side and Prof. Oichiro Kobori as the counterpart from the JGCA side. Title of the first commentary by Prof. Siewert was “Yet another new scientific journal?”, already anticipating several difficulties that await a new journal with no impact factor. Although several articles by non-Japanese authors were scattered in the first one or two issues, the journal soon began to be dominated by articles by the Japanese authors; some of them solicited to “write something” by Dr. Takeshi Sano, the managing editor who was using all of his resources to get the journal on track.

I was invited to the editorial board meeting some time in 1999 with Prof. Yuko Kitagawa, and began to review the manuscripts. Our names were listed among the editorial board members from 2000 onwards. Dr. Sano continued to check all the manuscripts by himself and never accepted manuscripts that did not satisfy him despite the excruciatingly small number of submissions. In addition, he was very cautious and strict with his selection of the reviewers and scrutinized the reviewers’ comments as well. Apparently, no one dared to decline the invitation to review from him. Thanks to the initial effort of Dr. Sano, the journal was assigned the impact factor of 2.614 in 2009: a great achievement at a time when the impact factor of several long-standing domestic journals barely exceeded 1.0.

Prof. Kitagawa became a new editor-in-chief in 2009 with the IGCA counterpart, Prof. Hubert Stein who was succeeded by Prof. Giovanni de Manzoni in 2017. During the reign of Prof. Kitagawa that continued for 10 years, Gastric Cancer became a prestigious journal whose impact factor exceeded 7 for 4 years in a row.

In this presentation, the editor-in-chief discusses about the current situation and future perspectives of the journal.