Takao Koike is now a professor emeritus at Hokkaido University and the chief advisor of the Hokkaido Medical Center for Rheumatic Diseases, Sapporo, Japan.
He held a professorship in the Second Department of Internal Medicine, Hokkaido University School of Medicine from 1992 to 2011. During his tenure, Professor Koike was consistently involved in research on SLE and antiphospholipid syndrome, and in 1998 he organized the 8th International Congress on Antiphospholipid Antibodies in Sapporo. There, he decided by consensus the first classification criteria for antiphospholipid syndromes (known as the Sapporo criteria).
Professor Koike has been a committee member or chair of many international conferences on SLE, Antiphospholipid Antibodies and Autoimmunity. Professor Koike served as President of the Japanese College of Rheumatology for four years from 2005.
