Shinya Yamanaka
© Rubenstein
- Born
- 4 September 1962
Dr Shinya Yamanaka is a Japanese stem cell researcher and Nobel laureate. His research into the reversal of adult cells into an embryonic state earned him a Nobel Prize and has revolutionised modern stem cell therapies as well as our understanding of cell development.
Son of an engineer and factory owner, Yamanaka was born in an industrial city in Japan in 1962. He was inspired by his father's diligence to his work and the curiosity and drive to create new functional instruments to improve quality of life. With his father's support to become a physician, Yamanaka undertook medical studies at Kobe University. Further interest in sports like judo and rugby made Yamanaka susceptible to a number of leg injuries and his experiences inspired him to become an orthopaedic surgeon.
While working on a hospital ward Yamanaka found his experiences 'painful and unforgettable', driving in him a career change towards a research scientist to study instead the causes and mechanisms of debilitating diseases. He travelled to America where genetic research was more accessible than in his own country. In 1993 at Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases, San Francisco he started researching the function of various genes in mice.
In 1999 Yamanaka became Associate Professor at the Nira Institute of Science and Technology in Japan. A laboratory came under his care and allowed him to have more control over the direction of his research, enabling him to progress his work on stem cells. Five years later he moved to Kyoto University where he could research embryonic stem cells – cells of the embryo that have the ability to form any type of cell in the body.
In 2005 Yamanaka discovered the factors required to reprogram adult cells back to their young embryonic state. This state is called the induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell – a stem cell that can become almost any type of cell in the body. Implications were wide, and since then researchers have started developing ways for personalised stem cell therapy.
Stem cell therapy uses adults cells, reverses them to induce pluripotent stem cells which can then be used to grow many types of tissues that can be transplanted back into the patient to replace cells lost due to damage or disease. Benefits of this method include the body not rejecting the transplant. For his pioneering research, Yamanaka received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2012 along with Sir John Gurdon.
My goal, all my life, is to bring this stem cell technology to the bedside, to patients, to clinics.
Shinya Yamanaka, 2012
Yamanaka is now Senior Investigator in Stem Cell Biology at the Gladstone Institute and Professor of Anatomy at the University of California, both in San Francisco. At Kyoto University he also holds the posts of the Director of the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA) and a Principal Investigator at the Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences.