Singapore, Sep 14, 2007: Acclaimed Japanese stem cell scientist Dr Shinya Yamanaka has joined the US-based Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease (GICD), where he will continue his research into reprogramming adult cells into embryonic stem (ES) cells.

 

Dr Yamanaka is the L K Whittier Foundation Investigator in Stem Cell Biology at Gladstone. He will also be a professor of anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco.

 

“Gladstone will provide Shinya with the resources and facilities to apply his research to human cells,” said Mr Deepak Srivastava, GICD Director. “Furthermore, we will have the great benefit of his unique knowledge and experience to advance the stem cell capability we’ve been building.”

“This is a great coup for Gladstone and for California,” said Dr Arlene Chiu, interim Chief Scientific Officer for the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM). “Dr Yamanaka's recent discovery in stem cell biology is one of the most significant and most innovative to date. We are delighted that he has elected to pursue his research with human cells here in California.”

 

In August 2006, Dr Yamanaka was the first scientist to report, in the journal Cell, on a new method for ‘reprogramming’ skin cells from mice into embryonic-like cells that can differentiate into other types of cells. This month, two separate teams of scientists affiliated with UCLA and MIT published papers confirming the approach. Dr Yamanaka also published a new study in Nature improving on his original research demonstrating that the reprogrammed cells generated from the adult-termed induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) had all the properties of ES cells, including the ability to generate a mouse entirely derived from the reprogrammed adult cells.

 

“If this approach works in human cells, it opens the door to finally generating patient-specific stem cells for therapeutic applications and discovery of disease mechanisms,” said Dr Srivastava. “This represents a key hurdle in the stem cell field and Shinya's discovery may obviate many of the ethical concerns surrounding human ES cell research.”

 

The Gladstone Institutes and Dr Yamanaka have had a long relationship. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Thomas L Innerarity in 1995, who was an investigator in GICD.

 

“The San Francisco Bay Area is driving stem cell research and innovation,” Dr Yamanaka said. “I'm excited to return to Gladstone, which has become an important contributor to this field.”

 

Dr Yamanaka received his MD from Kobe University and his PhD from the Osaka City University Graduate School. He completed a residency in orthopedic surgery at the National Osaka Hospital. After his fellowship at Gladstone, he joined the faculty of Osaka City University Medical School and then moved to the Nara Institute of Science and Technology and finally to the Institute for Frontier Medical Sciences at Kyoto University.