The Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences (IMCB) was established in 1993 by reorganizing the Institute of Applied Microbiology (IAM) that was founded in 1953.
As an institute affiliated with the University of Tokyo, IMCB currently has about 150 students from 6 different graduate schools in the university, i.i. Agriculture, Science, Pharmaceutical Science, Medicine, Engineering, and Frontier Sciences. Thus, IMCB functions as a center for mixing different disciplines of biological sciences. IMCB also accepts many post doctoral fellows supported either by the government or by private companies, and actively collaborates with various outside research groups.