Impact
Shinya Yamanaka is Director Emeritus and Professor at Kyoto University's Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA), which he directed from 2008, and a Senior Investigator at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco. In 2006 his laboratory showed that introducing four transcription factors into mouse somatic cells could reprogram them into induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells with properties nearly identical to embryonic stem cells, a result extended to human cells in 2007. This work established iPS cell technology for disease modelling, drug screening and cell therapy, and earned him the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with awards including the Lasker, Wolf and Shaw prizes. For the longevity field, the reprogramming factors he identified underpin research on partial reprogramming, in which older cells are reprogrammed only partway in an effort to rejuvenate them and slow some aging processes; Gladstone describes this as one of the most actively researched areas in longevity science. He served from 2022 to 2026 as an unpaid senior scientific advisor to Altos Labs, overseeing its rejuvenation research in Japan, and is no longer listed on the company's team. His current CiRA laboratory studies NAT1 (eIF4G2), organoids and stem cells, and multi-omics.
Metrics
- h-index 131 · google scholar as of 2026-09-23 source ↗
Links
Research fields
Sources & review · profile last updated 2026-09-29
- https://www.cira.kyoto-u.ac.jp/e/research/yamanaka_summary.html 2026-09-23
- https://gladstone.org/people/shinya-yamanaka 2026-09-23
- https://www.cira.kyoto-u.ac.jp/e/pressrelease/other/220119-160000.html 2026-09-23
- https://gladstone.org/news/shinya-yamanaka-made-cells-young-again-can-reverse-aging 2026-09-23
- https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=k6hepIAAAAAJ&hl=en 2026-09-23