John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for their research on resetting cells to their earliest developmental stages.The work has yet to yield a clear breakthrough in medical treatment, but it has revolutionized scientists ability to study both normal and diseased development. Gurdon, 79, performed his seminal work in the late 1950s and early 1960sa good deal of it before Yamanaka was born. In his most famous study, Gurdon showed that replacing the nucleus of an adult cell with the nucleus of an embryonic cell reset the adult cell to an embryonic state: Many of the cells became tadpoles. This strongly suggested that embryonic-state DNA and the molecules that controlled gene expression in the nucleus were sufficient to make a cell "pluripotent" againor capable of turning into any type of tissue in the body. Some40 years later, Yamanaka took this further by showing that adult mouse skin cells could be reset to their embryonic state just by adding a set of genes into the cells nuclei, and he later reduced this number to just four genes. The cells are now referred to as induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, … 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 →

This year's Nobel Prize for Medicine goes to... The 2012 Nobel Prize for medicine has been awarded to stem cell researchers John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka of Britain and Japan. They take the first Nobel prize of the year, with a flurry to follow over the next week. Judges in Stockholm said on Monday that the medicine prize had been awarded to the researchers "for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent," saying that this discovery had "revolutionized our understanding of how cells and organisms develop." Gurdon and Yamanaka are stem cell researchers who are seeking ways to obtain embryonic stem cells - a kind of genetic blank slate, cells that can be 'programmed' to take on many different forms and perform different functions - from the cells of an adult. Embryos themselves are another more controversial source of stem cells. "We are trying to find ways of obtaining embryo cells from the cells of an adult," Gurdon writes on his Gurdon Institute website. "The eventual aim is to provide replacement cells of all kinds starting from usually obtainable cells of an adult individual." A Nobel Prize medal on display in Stockholm The British scientist also … 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 →

Shinya Yamanaka of Japan and John Gurdon of Britain won the Nobel Prize on Monday for work in cell programming, a frontier that has nourished dreams of replacement tissue for people crippled by disease. The two scientists found that adult cells can be transformed back to an infant state called stem cells, the key ingredient in the vision of regenerative medicine. "Their findings have revolutionised our understanding of how cells and organisms develop," the Nobel jury declared. "By reprogramming human cells, scientists have created new opportunities to study diseases and develop methods for diagnosis and therapy." Among those who acclaimed the award were Britain's Royal Society, Ian Wilmut, "father" of Dolly the cloned sheep, and a leading ethicist, who said it eased a storm about the use of embryonic cells. Stem cells are precursor cells which differentiate into the various organs of the body. They have stirred huge excitement, with hopes that they can be coaxed into growing into replacement tissue for victims of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other diseases. Gurdon, 79, said he was grateful but also surprised by the honour, since his main research was done a half-century ago. In 1962, he discovered that the DNA code in the … Continue reading →

The 2012 Nobel Prize for medicine has been awarded to stem cell researchers John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka of Britain and Japan. They take the first Nobel prize of the year, with a flurry to follow over the next week. Judges in Stockholm said on Monday that the medicine prize had been awarded to the researchers "for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent," saying that this discovery had "revolutionized our understanding of how cells and organisms develop." Gurdon and Yamanaka are stem cell researchers who are seeking ways to obtain embryonic stem cells - a kind of genetic blank slate, cells that can be 'programmed' to take on many different forms and perform different functions - from the cells of an adult. Embryos themselves are another more controversial source of stem cells. "We are trying to find ways of obtaining embryo cells from the cells of an adult," Gurdon writes on his Gurdon Institute website. "The eventual aim is to provide replacement cells of all kinds starting from usually obtainable cells of an adult individual." The British scientist also said such a system was advantageous because the stem cells could be obtained from the patient … Continue reading →

Gail Martin, PhD Since 1981, when UCSFs Gail Martin, PhD, co-discovered embryonic stem cells in mice and coined the term embryonic stem cell, UCSF has been a key player in the stem cell field. The success in 1998 by the University of Wisconsins James Thomson in deriving human embryonic stem cells from embryos propelled the stem cell research field forward. Beginning in the late 1990s, UCSFs Roger Pedersen, PhD, was one of two University scientists nationwide the other being James Thomson, DVM, PhD, of the University of Wisconsin to pioneer the human embryonic stem cell field. Following Thomsons 1998 discovery of a technique for deriving human embryonic stem cells from donated embryos left over following in vitro fertilization efforts, Pedersens lab derived two of its own lines of cells using the same technique. In 2006, Shinya Yamanaka, MD, PhD, a senior investigator and the L.K. Whittier Foundation Investigator in Stem Cell Biology at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease and a professor of anatomy at UCSF, developed the method for inducing skin cells from mice into becoming like pluripotent stem cells and called them iPS cells. In 2007, Yamanaka did the same with adult human skin cells. Shinya Yamanaka, MD, … Continue reading →