Shinya Yamanaka, MD, PhD, left, and John Gurdon, PhD, speak at an Oct. 24 press briefing during the ISSCR-Roddenberry International Symposium on Cellular Reprogramming held at UCSF's Mission Bay campus.
More than two weeks after winning the 2012 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine Shinya Yamanaka, MD, PhD, and John Gurdon, PhD, were able to celebrate their monumental achievement together for stem cell discoveries made half a century and half a world apart.
The pair appropriately met for the International Symposium on Cellular Reprogramming, held in San Francisco last week at UCSFs Mission Bay campus by the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) and the Roddenberry Center for Stem Cell Biology and Medicine at the Gladstone Institutes.
During an Oct. 24 press briefing, Yamanaka president of the ISSCR, a Gladstone senior investigator and a UCSF professor of anatomy urged his home country of Japan to invest more in science, while Gurdon, of the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge, England, advocated for allowing well-informed patients to assume risks of clinical trials that might benefit them, without a burdensome amount of regulation.
The work for which they won the Nobel Prize, to be awarded in Stockholm in December, began in 1958 before Yamanaka was born when Gurdon cloned a normal tadpole by putting the DNA-enveloping nucleus of a skin cell from a frog into a de-nucleated frog egg. The experiment showed that the DNA from a fully mature cell body called a somatic cell still contains the genetic information needed to program the orderly development of a complete organism.
This knowledge inspired Yamanaka in his own work decades later.
Shinya Yamanaka, president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR), presented at the ISSCR-Roddenberry International Symposium on Cellular Reprogramming last week.
In 2007, Yamanaka showed that the manipulation of just four genes within a cell can induce a specialized skin cell to become a pluripotent stem cell one capable of spinning off virtually any cell type in the body. This achievement was one few thought possible, and it has inspired thousands of scientists and raised hopes for new therapies to replace damaged organs and tissues.
In the long term, the induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells first developed by Yamanaka may offer some advantages over embryonic stem cells in the study of disease and in the development of novel tissue transplants for damaged organs. Embryonic stem cells still are regarded as the gold standard of pluripotency, Yamanaka said, but iPS researchers are making rapid progress.
My hope is that one day we can use iPS cells instead of embryonic stem cells, Yamanaka said at the briefing.
Continue reading here:
Nobel Laureates Yamanaka and Gurdon Meet on UCSF Campus for Stem Cell Symposium
Recommendation and review posted by Fredricko
