Shinya Yamanaka is a Japanese researcher and is widely recognized for his work on stem cells. He also won a Nobel Prize for his breakthrough research in 2012 for his co-discovery that existing cells of the body can be turned into stem cells. Not just that, he also won the 2013 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences that is worth $3 million.
Yamanaka serves as the director of Center for iPS Cell (induced Pluripotent Stem Cell) Research and Application. He is also a professor at the Institute for Frontier Medical Sciences at Kyoto University. Previously, he was the president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR). Let’s learn more about him and his research.
Yamanaka’s life before the breakthrough research
Shinya Yamanaka was born in 1962 in Japan. He joined Osaka Kyoiku University after graduating from Tennōji High School. He received his M.D. degree at Kobe University in 1987 and went on to get his Ph.D. at Osaka City University Graduate School in 1993.
As of now, Yamanaka is working as a professor at Kyoto University, where he directs the Center for iPS Research and Application. From 1987 to 1989, he was a resident in orthopedic surgery at the National Osaka Hospital.
Between 1993 and 1996, Yamanaka was at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease. After that, till 1999, he worked as an assistant professor at Osaka City University Medical School.
Nobel Prize-winning research on iPS cells
Shinya Yamanaka received the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with Sir John B. Gurdon “for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent.”
Yamanaka proved that introduction of a small set of transcription factors into a differentiated cell was enough to bring back the cell to a pluripotent state. He focused on factors that are imperative to maintain pluripotency in embryonic stem (ES) cells. This marked the first occasion when an intact differentiated somatic cell could be reprogrammed to become pluripotent.
Knowing the fact that transcription factors were involved in the maintenance of the Pluripotent state, Yamanaka chose a set of 24 ES cell transcriptional factors as candidates to bring back pluripotency states in somatic cells.
What led Yamanaka to this research?
In the 20th century, it was believed that mature cells were permanently locked into differentiated states and can’t go back to their immature, pluripotent stem cell state. It was believed that cellular differentiation can only be unidirectional. Hence, differentiated egg/early embryo cells can only become specialized cells.
However, stem cells with limited potency stay intact in bone marrow, intestine, skin, and other parts of the body, and act as a source of replacement. The fact that differentiated cell types feature specific patterns of proteins indicated irreversible epigenetic modifications to be the main reason behind unidirectional cell differentiation.
Yamanaka went on to win the 2010 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the field of biomedicine. He later won the Wolf Prize in medicine with Rudolf Jaenisch in 2011, and in 2012, he received the Millennium Technology Prize along with Linus Torvalds.
