Shinya Yamanaka

Shinya Yamanaka is a Japanese physician and stem cell researcher who discovered that mature, already-differentiated adult cells can be reprogrammed back into an embryonic-like pluripotent state, overturning the long-held assumption that cellular differentiation was a one-way, irreversible process. In 2006 his laboratory identified four transcription factor genes, often called the Yamanaka factors, Oct4, Sox2, Klf4 and c-Myc, that when introduced into an adult mouse skin cell were sufficient to convert it into what he named an induced pluripotent stem cell, or iPS cell. By 2007 his team had repeated this reprogramming using human cells, showing the technique could in principle generate patient-specific pluripotent stem cells without the ethical concerns attached to embryonic stem cells. He shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with John Gurdon for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent. Yamanaka earned his medical degree from Kobe University in 1987 and his doctorate from Osaka City University in 1993, and directs the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application at Kyoto University while also serving as a senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco.