Posted on behalf of Carolina Pola

MADRID — Adding another notch to his belt of international accolades, stem cell pioneer Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University was named the third annual winner of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Biomedicine. At the award ceremony, held here last month at the Palace of the Marqués de Salamanca, a who’s who of Spanish and international scientific and political elite drank sangria and ate tapas to toast the winners in the eight different categories celebrated by the foundation.

At the event, Yamanaka, who will take home €400,000 ($570,000) for the award, explained the genesis of his landmark 2006 experiment in which he created the world’s first induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells in mice, and then later in human cells. A crucial moment, he said, came when he was looking down the microscope at human embryos and his mind turned to his two daughters. Not wanting to destroy human embryos that could become children, at that point he decided that he would try to create pluripotent cells from adult tissue.

In a press conference, Yamanaka fielded questions about his paper published last month reporting that adding a transcription factor called Glis1 to the regular reprogramming recipes boosted the efficiency of the process without needing the proto-oncogene Myc, an approach that may increase the safety of iPS cells for future biomedical use.

He also responded to some of the recent studies reporting immunogenic and epigenetic differences between iPS cells and their embryonic counterparts. The full characterization and biology of the reprogrammed cells is still a work in progress, Yamanaka said. and despite considerable hurdles ahead — such as avoiding the cancer potential of these cells — he remains confident that iPS cells will become a therapeutic reality.

Image: BBVA Foundation