At a ceremony for the METI Industrial Standardization Awards held on October 8, Masahiro Ibukiyama, senior technical adviser (STA) within the New Business Planning and Development Department, received an Economy, Trade and Industry Minister’s Award.
The Industrial Standardization Awards are held by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) every year in October during the Industrial Standardization Promotion Month. The are a public acknowledgement of people’s meritorious services in industrial standardization, such as for the formulation of international or domestic standards or for conformity assessment activities.

STA Ibukiyama was highly praised for his services as a Japanese member and as secretariat committee manager of ISO/TC206 (Fine Ceramics), and for his efforts to establish international standards for phosphor materials used in white LEDs, thereby contributing to improving Japan’s position and strengthening its competitiveness.

METI (FY2019 Industrial Standardization Award Recipients)
https://www.meti.go.jp/press/2019/10/20191007001/20191007001.html

The global uruoi website, which is administered by Denka Corporation (New York, US), has been awarded Site of the Day (SOTD) by the international web design award, Awwwards.

Awwwards is a prominent web design award that is attracting the attention of web creators around the world. Using the four evaluation criteria of Design, Usability, Creativity and Content, jury members and registered users vote every day, and the best design and functional website is selected as the Site of the Day (SOTD).

The global uruoi website which won the SOTD award on this occasion, was evaluated highly, scoring at least 7.2 out of 10 in all four criteria. The website has been recently launched by Denka Corporation to strengthen sales of uruoi in the US.

Awwwards. website announcing the award:
https://www.awwwards.com/sites/uruoi-japanese-skincare

Global uruoi website:
https://uruoiskincare.com (recommended browsers: Google Chrome or Safari)

Yasuki Ito,General manager of Diagnostic Reagentｓ Academic Research Department at Denka Seiken Co., Ltd., which is a consolidated subsidiary of Denka Company Limited, has received the ZAK Award from the American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC) for services in developing “small, dense LDL-C,^*1” a diagnostic reagent used in automated chemistry analyzers.^*2

The ZAK Award was established by the AACC in 1990 in honor of Dr. Bennie Zak who rendered distinguished services in the field of clinical testing. It is an honorable award bestowed once every two years by the AACC Lipoproteins and Vascular Diseases Division (LVDD) to persons who have made remarkable contributions to clinical chemistry research in the same field.
The award ceremony took place on August 5, 2019 at an AACC LVDD seminar being held in Anaheim in the US. The recipient, Yasuki Ito, presented a commemorative speech after receiving the award from Katsuyuki Nakajima, chairman of the LVDD.

Denka Seiken has been selling the sd LDL-C diagnostic reagent based on this development in the US since July 2018 as an in-vitro diagnostic (IVD) reagent.^*3 Being a product that can evaluate the risk of heart disease simply, quickly and cost-effectively, Denka Seiken is stepping up business expansion in Japan and China, as well as in the US, and will continue to contribute to the maintenance of human health and the prevention of disease.

• *1sd LDL-C (small, dense LDL cholesterol): marker for evaluating the risk of cardiovascular diseases
• *2AACC website: Lipoproteins and Vascular Diseases Division Awards
  https://www.aacc.org/community/divisions/lipoproteins-and-vascular-diseases/awards
• *3News release (July 31, 2018): The Denka Group Begins U.S. Sales of In-Vitro Diagnostic Reagent for Heart Disease Risk Marker sd LDL-C
  https://www.denka.co.jp/eng/storage/news/pdf/204/20180731_sd%20LDL-C_en.pdf

At the 39th Conference of the Society for Chemistry and Micro-Nano Systems (CHEMINAS39), which was held at Kanazawa University on May 27–28, Shuhei Aoyama of the Denka Innovation Center’s Advanced Technologies Research Institute received an Outstanding Research Award in the poster category.

His award-winning theme was “development of lateral flow immunoassay devices utilizing thermally imprinted polymeric sheets,” and proposed a new immunoassay platform utilizing micromachining technology. Details of Aoyama’s study will be published in the society’s journal at a later date.

Society’s website announcing the award:
http://cheminas.chips.jp/commendation/presentation-award/research-group-commendation/

A paper written by Denka researchers, including Shuhei Aoyama, has been printed in the March 2019 edition of Analyst, a UK scientific journal published by the Royal Society of Chemistry. The paper was so highly rated it was also selected for the cover of the journal. 
The paper proposes a new immunoassay platform that utilizes a polymer sheet fabricated by nanoimprinting (a type of micromachining technology). The microcone structure produced on the sheet allows for the high-sensitivity and rapid detection of an intended antigen. In addition, by examining the types of polymeric materials used and the shape of the microstructure in detail, the researchers accomplished the high-sensitivity detection of proteins in blood. Given the high degree of homogeneity and transparency compared to existing immunoassay kits, this new platform is expected to be applied as a next-generation immunoassay platform.

[Title of article]

Thermally imprinted microcone structure-assisted lateral-flow immunoassay platforms for detecting disease marker proteins
marker proteins
Shuhei Aoyama, Yuto Akiyama, Kenji Monden, Masumi Yamada and Minoru Seki*
Analyst, 2019, 144, 1519−1526.　* This article has been co-authored with Chiba University.

[Link to paper]

http://xlink.rsc.org/?DOI=C8AN01903G

[Link to front cover]

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/an/c9an90022e/unauth#!divAbstract