09-10-2012 13:43 Gladstone and UCSF leaders celebrated news of the Nobel Prize for Yamanaka, MD, PhD, a senior investigator at the UCSF-affiliated Gladstone Institutes and a UCSF professor of anatomy, who discovered a way to reprogram ordinary human skin cells into stem cells that could be used to grow tissues for organ transplantation and for other medical applications. His discovery came nearly 50 years after John Gurdon, PhD, of the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge, England -- with whom Yamanaka shares the Nobel Prize -- showed in frogs that the genetic program of a mature cell could be "reset" to its embryonic state. The stem cell discovery by Shinya Yamanaka that won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Medicine not only has transformed the research landscape, but it has revolutionized medicine over the coming decade, colleagues at the Gladstone Institutes and UCSF say. See original here: Gladstone, UCSF Leaders Reflect on Shinya Yamanaka's Nobel Prize - Video … Continue reading →

Kyodo / Reuters Kyoto University Professor Shinya Yamanaka (left) and John Gurdon of the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge, England, at a symposium on induced pluripotent stem cells in Tokyo in April 2008 In a testament to the revolutionary potential of the field of regenerative medicine, in which scientists are able to create and replace any cells that are at fault in disease, the Nobel Prize committee on Monday awarded the 2012 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine to two researchers whose discoveries have made such cellular alchemy possible. The prize went to John B. Gurdon of the University of Cambridge in England, who was among the first to clone an animal, a frog, in 1962, and to Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan who in 2006 discovered the four genes necessary to reprogram an adult cell back to an embryonic state. Sir John Gurdon, who is now a professor at an institute that bears his name, earned the ridicule of many colleagues back in the 1960s when he set out on a series of experiments to show that the development of cells could be reversed. At the time, biologists knew that all cells in an embryo had the potential to … Continue reading →

Shinya Yamanaka could have made bits of sewing machines for a living. Instead, his tinkering with the building blocks of life has made him a Nobel prize winner. Born in 1962 in a Japan beginning a decades-long manufacturing boom, Yamanaka was the only son of a factory owner who produced parts for sewing machines. But even as the country's industries exploded in the 1970s, his father told him he should not follow the traditional Japanese path and take over the family business, but become a doctor. Half a century later and after a stint as an orthopaedic surgeon, he is a leading authority on how cells work. Kyoto University-based Yamanaka was being celebrated on Monday for his work, alongside Briton John Gurdon, on how cells can be reprogrammed. So-called 'nuclear reprogramming' uses a fully-developed adult cell to create a stem cell - a kind of blank slate that has the potential to become any other kind of cell in the body. Scientists say in this way they can generate materials either to experiment on, or to use within the body - perhaps as a means of repairing or even replacing damaged or diseased organs. Gurdon's work proved that mature cells … Continue reading →

Mariselle Lancero, a research associate II, and research scientist Kiichiro Tomoda, PhD, work in the Yamanaka Lab at the Gladstone Institutes on the day Shinya Yamanaka won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Stem cell researcher Shinya Yamanaka, MD, PhD, reached in Kyoto shortly after being named winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, said he was doing some housecleaning when the call came in, and was very surprised. But at UCSF, where Yamanaka joined the faculty in 2007, splitting his time between Kyoto University and the UCSF-affiliated Gladstone Institutes, his winning the Nobel Prize was considered virtually inevitable. The only surprise, colleagues say, was that the honor came so quickly. Often the Nobel Committee waits decades before awarding the prize to make sure the discovery stands the test of time. Its rare for a scientists influence on scientific thought and experimentation to spread as fast as it did in this case. Yamanaka discovered keys to the developmental destiny of cells, and how these keys can be used to manipulate cell fate in ways that offer hope to scientists who seek new methods of providing tissues for organ transplantation and for other medical applications. His seminal … Continue reading →

Nobel Prize Commemorative Coin. Image Credit: Wikipedia (public domain) Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online Stem cell research has been a controversial, yet important advance in science and medicine for decades. Scientific research has been carried out in numerous areas pertaining to stem cells, and the work of two such researchers in the field have caught the eye of the most prestigious awards organization in the world. Britains Sir John Gurdon and Japans Shinya Yamanaka were both awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize for Medicine thanks to their tireless research in nuclear programming, a process that instructs adult cells to form early stem cells which can then be used to form any tissue type. Gurdon, whose work included taking intestinal samples to clone frogs, and Yamanaka, whose work altered genes to reprogram cells, were awarded the prize by a committee at Stockholms Karolinska Institute on Monday. The committee said the discoveries made by both men have revolutionized our understanding of how cells and organisms develop. Sir John Gurdons work is from 1962. In his research, he showed that the genetic information inside a cell gleaned from the intestines of a frog contained all the information needed to create a whole … Continue reading →

NEW YORK, Oct. 9, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --Today, The New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) will award a Japanese scientist with the NYSCF Robertson Prize for his extraordinary achievements in translational stem cell research. This award will go to Kazutoshi Takahashi, PhD, Lecturer, Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA) at Kyoto University, for his vital contribution to induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell derivation. Dr. Takahashi was lead author on a series of landmark papers that described reprogramming adult cells into iPS cells, which were published while he was a postdoctoral researcher in Shinya Yamanaka's, MD, PhD, laboratory at Kyoto University. Yesterday, judges in Stockholm announced that Dr. Yamanaka and Sir John Gurdon, DPhil, the Gurdon Institute, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their stem cell research breakthroughs. Both scientists demonstrated that adult cells can be reprogrammed into pluripotent cells, cells that can become any cell type in the body. The NYSCF Robertson prize will be presented at a ceremony in New York City by Susan L. Solomon, CEO of The New York Stem Cell Foundation, and Professor Peter J. Coffey, DPhil, the inaugural recipient of the NYSCF Robertson Prize in 2011, Executive Director of Translation at … Continue reading →

CARLSBAD, CA--(Marketwire - Oct 9, 2012) - International Stem Cell Corporation ( OTCQB : ISCO ) (www.internationalstemcell.com) ("ISCO" or "the Company"), a California-based biotechnology company focused on therapeutic and research products, congratulates Sir John Gurdon and Dr. Shinya Yamanaka on the recently announced Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering cellular reprogramming to create pluripotent stem cells.These discoveries lead to the development of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) which is now a major area of research.However, currently cellular reprogramming is accomplished by inserting genetic material, via a virus or otherwise, which raises serious safety concerns when developing treatments.ISCO has developed a technology that potentially allows for the creation of a new generation of iPS cells without these safety concerns.Unlike methods requiring the use of viruses or DNA constructs that may integrate into the genome, ISCO's new method utilizes only proteins which are naturally eliminated once they have served their purpose. Dr. Ruslan Semechkin, Vice President and head of ISCO's Research and Development comments, "Overall, our new technology represents a level of control that is much finer than the multiple infections necessary for viral-based systems which cannot be turned off and where the dosage level cannot be modulated.Moreover, ISCO's method … Continue reading →