SciTech Gist Celebrity of the Week: Professor Shinya Yamanaka

Professor Shinya Yamanaka was born 52 years ago in  Higashiōsaka Japan. In 1987, he earned his MD from Kobe University and PhD from Osaka City University in 1993, all in Japan. Shinya Yamanaka started his residency in orthopaedic surgery at the National Osaka Hospital, spending only two years (1987 to 1989) after which he pulled out, one likely reason being that at one point he could not remove a benign tumour from a patient after spending one hour in the theatre, whereas a skilled surgeon could do so in roughly ten minutes. In fact, some colleagues at the hospital mocked him, calling him an obstacle to the medical profession.

Professor Yamanaka's Lab at the Gladstone Institute. Image credit to University of California San Francisco 

Having pulled out of residency, he decided to come to the US where he spent three years (1993 to 1996) at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease. By the end of 1996, he returned to Japan and took up the position of an assistant professor at Osaka City University Medical School; instead of doing research, he found himself looking after mice in the lab.

Still determined to pursue his dream founded on an insight he had on stem cells (cells that have not undergone any differentiation to take up specialized forms such as skin cells,heart cells and so on), he took up a stem cell research job at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in 1999. And for the next six to seven years he worked on stem cells pioneering a new technique he called Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell technology (iPS cell) which involves the reversal of a fully differentiated and specialized cell, like a mature heart cell called cardiomyocyte, back to a pluripotent stem cell similar to those in the embryo (a 7-day old fertilized egg in the womb) and which can now be re-transformed into a different kind of specialized cell, like a skin cell.

The application of this breakthrough in stem cell biology quickly spread like wild fire in different areas of the medical field, presenting a whole new base for the study of degenerative diseases like Alzheimer, Parkinson and so on, whose development and progression were poorly understood because of the limitations in the current techniques employed in studying them. For instance, I can take a neuron (brain cell) from  an Alzheimer patient (one whose brain cells are progressively dying), reverse it back to a stem cell and re-transform it to any other cell type: in doing this, I can observe the actual changes at the genetic and molecular level which occurred in this neuron with the onset and progression of the disease by comparing its genetic framework with that of a normal neuron from the same patient. This iPS cell technology has already started revealing very potent targets of drug development for some of these incurable diseases, raising hopes for their treatment. Also, this technology has helped provide an alternative to the use of embryonic stem cells for many research purposes in the field of regenerative medicine, circumventing ethical issues surrounding the use of human embryos for research: basically, if I want to use stem cells for my research, all I have to do is get cells from any part of the body--hair, skin, saliva--and reprogramme them to stem cells.

And for this novel breakthrough, Professor Shinya Yamanaka was jointly awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize

Professor Yamanaka receiving the 2012 Nobel Prize in Medicine from His Majesty King Carl XVI of Sweden. Image credit to the Nobel Assembly

in Medicine or Physiology with Sir Professor John Gurdon, a Cell Biologist at the University of Cambridge, who pioneered the technique of cloning animals from non gamete cells. In 2013, he received the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, an award by Facebook, Google and a genetics company 23andMe.