Shinya Yamanaka ( , Yamanaka Shin'ya?, born September 4, 1962) is a Japanese Nobel Prize-winning stem cell researcher.[1][2][3] He serves as the director of Center for iPS Cell Research and Application and a professor at the Institute for Frontier Medical Sciences at Kyoto University; as a senior investigator at the UCSF-affiliated J. David 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).

He received the Wolf Prize in Medicine in 2011 with Rudolf Jaenisch;[6] the Millennium Technology Prize in 2012 together with Linus Torvalds. 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.[7] In 2013 he was awarded the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for his work.

Yamanaka was born in Higashisaka Japan in 1962. After graduating from Tennji High School attached to Osaka Kyoiku University,[8] he received his M.D. at Kobe University in 1987 and his PhD at Osaka City University Graduate School 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, USA and Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan. Yamanaka is currently Professor at Kyoto University, where he directs its Center for iPS Research and Application. He is also a senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes as well as the director of the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application.[9]

Between 1987 and 1989, Yamanaka was a resident in orthopedic surgery at the National Osaka Hospital. His first operation, was removing a benign tumor from his friend Shuichi Hirata, a task he could not complete after one hour, when a skilled surgeon would take ten minutes or so. Some seniors referred to him as "Jamanaka", a pun on the Japanese word for obstacle.[10]

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.[10]

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 19992003, 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 20032005. Between 2004 and 2010, Yamanaka was a professor at the Institute for Frontier Medical Sciences.[11] Currently, Yamanaka is the director and a professor at the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application at Kyoto University.

In 2006, he and his team generated induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) from adult mouse fibroblasts.[1] 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,[2] 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.[1]

Yamanaka practiced judo (2dan black belt) and played rugby as a university student. He also has a history of running marathons. After a 20-year gap, he competed in the inaugural Osaka Marathon in 2011 as a charity runner with a time of 4:29:53. He also took part in the 2012 Kyoto Marathon to raise money for iPS research, finishing in 4:03:19. He also ran in the second Osaka Marathon on November 25, 2012.[12]

In 2007, Yamanaka was recognized as a "Person Who Mattered" in the Time Person of the Year edition of Time Magazine.[13] Yamanaka was also nominated as a 2008 Time 100 Finalist.[14] In June 2010, Yamanaka was awarded the Kyoto Prize for reprogramming adult skin cells to pluripotential precursors. Yamanaka developed the method as an alternative to embryonic stem cells, thus circumventing an approach in which embryos would be destroyed.

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Shinya Yamanaka - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia