Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka of the Institute for Frontier Medical Science, Kyoto University.... [+]
Nobel laureate Shinya Yamanaka, has been attending the annual meetings of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) from the beginning, when the society was launched in 2002.
He made his first presentation at the second annual meeting in 2003, which was held in Washington, DC. No more than a few hundred researchers attended at the time, he recalled.
At the 2006 ISSCR, Yamanaka presented his findings on the four factors that could generate induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from adult mouse cells. This was the work that earned him the Nobel Prize, along with John Gurdon in 2012.
This year, at the 11th annual meeting of the ISSCR in Boston, Yamanaka said over 4000 are registered attendees. "This is the largest annual meeting in the ISSCR's history."
But, it was not that long ago, he said in his opening remarks at the meeting when it got underway yesterday, that he had returned to his homeland in Japan after a stint as a post-doc in the US, and was unsure of his future.
"I did my post-doctoral training in San Francisco, at the Gladstone Institute, between 1993 and 1997." His mentor was Dr. Tom Innerarity, who ran a lab devoted to cardiovascular disease.
During that training experience, Yamanaka 'met' a very special type of cells. Mouse embryonic stem cells.
Back home in Japan at the end of 1997, he continued research on mouse ESCs on his own. "I identified one molecule which played an essential role in the pluripotency of mouse ES cells."
But it wasn't easy. He began to suffer what he calls, PAD (Post American Depression).
"I was working at a medical school at the time, and many of the scientists around me, did not understand what I was working on." They pressured him to return to clinical medicine--to do work more directly related to human patients, human medicine.
"I was about to quit from science and go back to the clinics." But two events rescued him from PAD and going back to clinical practice.
The first was the derivation of human embryonic stem cells by James Thomson in 1998. "Because of his success," said Yamanaka, "I learned that ES cells are very related to human diseases, human patients. We may be able to help people suffering from many diseases using ES cells, I thought. So that was one reason why I recovered."
The second event: Soon after, in 1999, he became a principle investigator at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology where he started his own lab for the first time and gathered a team of brilliant students.
The rest is history.
Yamanaka will be speaking in more detail about the evolution of iPSC research tomorrow at ISSCR.
But to come full circle, his first job at this year's meeting, was to present a prestigious award to the man whose work helped 'save' him from clinical medicine.
That was to present James Thomson the 2013 winner of the McEwen Award for innovation in stem cells and regenerative medicine.
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