Akiko Iwasaki

[4] Iwasaki was born and raised in Iga, Japan by her father Hiroshi, a physicist, and mother Fumiko, who fought for women's rights in the workplace.

Iwasaki did her postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health in the lab of mucosal immunologist Brian Lee Kelsall.

[6] While working on her PhD project of how DNA vaccines elicit an immune response, Iwasaki was among the first to show that antigen-presenting cells were in the blood, not the muscle.

Iwasaki and her team study immune responses to influenza in the lungs and herpes simplex virus in the genital tract.

[5] Based on this strategy, Iwasaki has developed a vaccine that is currently in a clinical trial to treat women with precancerous lesions in the cervix to prevent cervical cancer.

[8] Building on her interests in immune responses to viral infection, Iwasaki has also led research into human rhinovirus and Zika virus.

[12] According to Google Scholar, one of her publications, "Toll-like receptor control of the adaptive immune response,"[13] has been cited over 5,300 times as of August 2023 and was published in Nature Immunology in October 2004.