It’s been 20 years since stem cell scientists Drs Shinya Yamanaka and Kazutoshi Takahashi from Kyoto University’s Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA) published how four transcription factors can reprogram fully differentiated cells to an “embryonic-like state,” as they phrased it in their paper about mouse cells. And soon thereafter they published about reprogramming in human cells.
And it’s been 21 years since Yamanaka’s then postdoctoral research associate Takahashi –he now heads his own CiRA lab--rushed into his advisor’s office asking him to come look through the microscope.
The cells looked like embryonic stem cells but that’s not what they were: they were cells in which the clock of development had been turned back. These were induced pluripotent stem cells. Shinya Yamanaka received the Nobel Prize in 2012 for this work.
My story in Nature Methods iPS cells: history made and history in the making is with Drs Yamanaka and Takahashi and many others who talk about how this finding has shaped their trajectory in science.
“I immediately appreciated the momentousness of the discovery because my lab was pursuing very similar strategies,” says George Daley, MD,PhD, Dean of Harvard Medical School. “I also immediately realized that our approach was limited and unlikely to succeed.” The IPS cell-generating method “was truly a eureka moment.”
And in case you hadn't yet heard that 'Takahashing' is a verb that describes a certain approach to science, please read the story to find out a bit more about this.
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I also produced a documentary about this finding called Turning back time in cells with Dr. Shinya Yamanaka. My co-interviewer is Stylianos Lefkopoulos, PhD, a manuscript editor at Nature Cell Biology.
Here is an excerpt focused on patients and the prospects for clinical applications of induced pluripotent stem cells
Here is a sneak-peek podcast about the upcoming meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research. It's with the the two program chairs of the ISSCR annual meeting who share a bit about the meeting and some trends they see. They are Dr Fiona Doetsch from the University of Basel and Dr Nozomu Yachie from the University of British Columbia who has a lab at the University of Osaka too.
You can find the podcast on the streaming platforms of your choice.
Here it is on Spotify , here it is on Apple podcasts.
Some snippets from the podcast:
Dr. Fiona Doetsch:
One of the things I'm most pleased about is that we have so many first time speakers at the meeting. So we have about 80% first time speakers at the annual meeting. So one of our goals was really to try and reach out to people and bring new perspectives to present at the meeting. And so I'm thrilled that this, we were very successful at this. It's a very international set of speakers.
...another really key finding now is this idea that we have different sets of stem cells in the brain, and perhaps in the body that respond to different signals, and at least in the brain. Now if you can trigger these different stem cells, it provides a whole new kind of plasticity...
I think one of the amazing things about the stem cell field is it does have this breadth and and that you can go in many different directions and so and move from basic science to translation, if you want to, but you can also be engaged on different levels.
Dr. Nozumo Yachie
Dr. Nozomu Yachie:
...engineering is important. We need to reverse engineer our object to understand what it is. And also, genome editing has lots of therapeutic potential. You can fix, correct, the mutation, and then use that stem cell reagent for therapy. I wouldn't create any hype on this, but that's the potential. And lots of researchers are working on this...
We also, I think, have lots of different talks on different aspects of engineering, biology and new approaches in vitro to model some of these more complex in vivo niches. So I think this is another aspect of engineering that's really exciting at the moment in the field...
Here is an interview with Dr. Shinya Yamanaka in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery
Here are a few papers :
Takahashi, K. & Yamanaka, S. Cell 126, 663–676 (2006).
Gurdon, J. B. Dev. Biol. 4, 256–273 (1962).
Takahashi, K. et al. Cell 131, 861–872 (2007).
Takahashi, K. & Yamanaka, S. Nat. Rev. Mol. Cell Biol. 17, 183–193 (2016).
Yamanaka, S. Cell Stem Cell 33, 372–381 (2026).
(Credit: Photo by Nikhita Singhal on Unsplash)