Shinya Yamanaka

Shinya Yamanaka (山中 伸弥) is a Japanese stem cell researcher and a Nobel Prize laureate.

He is a professor and the director emeritus of Center for iPS Cell (induced Pluripotent Stem Cell) Research and Application, Kyoto University; as a senior investigator at the UCSF-affiliated Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, California; and as a professor of anatomy at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

Yamanaka is also a past president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR).

Yamanaka was born in Higashiōsaka, Japan, in 1962.

In 1962, John B. Gurdon demonstrated that the nucleus from a differentiated frog intestinal epithelial cell can generate a fully functional tadpole via transplantation to an enucleated egg.

After graduating from Tennōji High School attached to Osaka Kyoiku University, he received his M.D. degree at Kobe University in 1987 and his Ph.D. degree at Osaka City University, Graduate School of Medicine in 1993.

After this, he went through a residency in orthopedic surgery at National Osaka Hospital and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease, San Francisco.

Afterwards, he worked at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, US, and Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan.

Yamanaka is currently a professor and the director emeritus of Center for iPS Research and Application (CiRA), Kyoto University.

He is also a senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes.

Between 1987 and 1989, Yamanaka was a resident in orthopedic surgery at the National Osaka Hospital.

His first operation was to remove a benign tumor from his friend Shuichi Hirata, a task he could not complete after one hour when a skilled surgeon would have taken ten minutes or so.

Some seniors referred to him as "Jamanaka", a pun on the Japanese word for obstacle.

From 1993 to 1996, he was at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease.

Between 1996 and 1999, he was an assistant professor at Osaka City University Medical School, but found himself mostly looking after mice in the laboratory, not doing actual research.

His wife advised him to become a practicing doctor, but instead he applied for a position at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology.

He stated that he could and would clarify the characteristics of embryonic stem cells, and this can-do attitude won him the job.

From 1999–2003, he was an associate professor there, and started the research that would later win him the 2012 Nobel Prize.

He became a full professor and remained at the institute in that position from 2003–2005.

Between 2004 and 2010, Yamanaka was a professor at the Institute for Frontier Medical Sciences, Kyoto University.

In 2006, he and his team generated induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) from adult mouse fibroblasts.

iPS cells closely resemble embryonic stem cells, the in vitro equivalent of the part of the blastocyst (the embryo a few days after fertilization) which grows to become the embryo proper.

They could show that his iPS cells were pluripotent, i.e. capable of generating all cell lineages of the body.

Later he and his team generated iPS cells from human adult fibroblasts, again as the first group to do so.

A key difference from previous attempts by the field was his team's use of multiple transcription factors, instead of transfecting one transcription factor per experiment.

They started with 24 transcription factors known to be important in the early embryo, but could in the end reduce it to 4 transcription factors – Sox2, Oct4, Klf4 and c-Myc.

He received the 2010 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the biomedicine category, the 2011 Wolf Prize in Medicine with Rudolf Jaenisch, and the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize together with Linus Torvalds.

Between 2010-2022, Yamanaka was the director and a professor at the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA), Kyoto University.

In April 2022, he stepped down and took place of the director emeritus of CiRA keeping with professor position.

In 2012, he and John Gurdon were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for the discovery that mature cells can be converted to stem cells.

The 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly to Sir John B. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka "for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent."

There are different types of stem cells.

These are some types of cells that will help in understanding the material.

The prevalent view during the early 20th century was that mature cells were permanently locked into the differentiated state and cannot return to a fully immature, pluripotent stem cell state.

It was thought that cellular differentiation can only be a unidirectional process.

Therefore, non-differentiated egg/early embryo cells can only develop into specialized cells.

However, stem cells with limited potency (adult stem cells) remain in bone marrow, intestine, skin etc. to act as a source of cell replacement.

The fact that differentiated cell types had specific patterns of proteins suggested irreversible epigenetic modifications or genetic alterations to be the cause of unidirectional cell differentiation.

So, cells progressively become more restricted in the differentiation potential and eventually lose pluripotency.

In 2013, he was awarded the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for his work.