SCIENCE REPORTER
Shinya Yamanaka, the Japanese researcher who transformed skin cells from the wrinkled face of an 81-year-old man into stem cells, is one of this year's winners of the prestigious Canada Gairdner Awards for medical research.
The awards, to be announced today, will be presented in Toronto in October. They are known as the "baby Nobels" because 73 winners over the past 50 years also became Nobel laureates.
Dr. Yamanaka discovered a way to reprogram adult cells so they regain the superhero-like abilities of embryonic stem cells, which give rise to every type of cell - blood, bone, brain and 250 other specialized cells that make up the human body.
His work, first in mice, then with human cells, involves using viruses to insert genes that return cells to an embryonic-like state. It may allow scientists to sidestep ethical concerns about harvesting stem cells from human embryos in hopes of developing new therapies for patients with spinal cord injuries, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes or Parkinson's.
It also offers researchers a powerful new tool to study the roots of complex diseases. If scientists can take cells from a patient and reprogram them to an embryonic state in the lab, they can then study what goes wrong as those cells develop and also assess if potential new drugs might work.
"It is a great honour for me to receive the prestigious Gairdner Award," Dr. Yamanka, who works at Kyoto University in Japan, told The Globe and Mail in an e-mail. He thanked the junior researchers, postdoctoral fellows, technicians and students in his lab who are part of his team. "Winning this award is surely encouraging for my group to work harder."
The awards were founded in 1959 by Toronto businessman James Gairdner. Last year, the federal government announced a $20-million endowment for the Gairdner Foundation, which means this year each recipient will get $100,000, compared with the $30,000 prize that each of last year's winners took home. The Globe is a media sponsor of the 2009 awards.
The other four winners of a Gairdner international award this year include Lucy Shapiro of Stanford University and Richard Losick of Harvard University for their basic research on how bacteria grow, divide or become dormant.
Kyoto University's Kazutoshi Mori and the University of California's Peter Walter won for their work investigating how proteins get folded in the cell.
The inaugural Global Health award will go to Nubia Munoz, emeritus professor of the National Cancer Institute in Colombia, for work that led to developing vaccines to protect against cervical cancer.
David Sackett, a professor emeritus at McMaster University in Hamilton, , won the Gairdner Wightman Award, which is given to a Canadian who has demonstrated outstanding leadership in medicine. Dr. Sackett is a pioneer in the field of evidence-based medicine, which aims to teach doctors how to separate good research from bad and apply it to the individual needs of their patients.
The winners will take part in a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the awards. The Gairdner Foundation is planning to bring 50 previous winners, including 20 Nobel laureates, to Toronto Oct. 28 to 30 for lectures, panels and other public events.
Organizers say it will be the largest gathering of the world's top scientists ever held in Canada. Between March and November, seven international symposiums will also be held, in Vancouver, Edmonton, Ottawa, Toronto, Sherbrooke, Montreal and Halifax.
Dr. Yamanaka is perhaps the most high profile of this year's winners. Since he announced he had turned human skin cells into stem cells in 2007, researchers have been working on ways to do the same thing without using a virus, which can damage DNA. The genes Dr. Yamanaka used in his experiments can also cause cancer if they remain in cells.
This month, Andras Nagy of Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital and his colleagues announced they had developed a technique to turn skin cells into stem cells without either of these drawbacks.
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Past winners.
1987
France's Luc Montagnier and American Robert Gallo, for identifying HIV as responsible for AIDS.
1990
Francis S. Collins, John R. Riordan and Lap-Chee Tsui, for discovering the gene that causes cystic fibrosis.
1996
Australian Barry Marshall, for discovering that bacteria can cause peptic ulcers.
2007
American Dennis Slamon, for developing the new breast cancer drug Herceptin.
2008
Two Canadians win: The University of Calgary's Samuel Weiss, for his discovery that the adult brain can produce new cells, and McGill's Nahum Sonenberg, for his work on how our DNA creates the proteins that make up our bodies and keep them running.