860: Dr. Koji Tanabe on Reprogramming Aging: iPSCs, Longevity, and Cellular Rejuvenation

[upbeat music] Well, hello, hello, guys.

You're listening to Beauty Bytes with Dr. K: Secrets of a Plastic Surgeon.

And today's podcast is fascinating.

If you don't know what Yamanaka factors are, we're gonna learn that, and we're gonna learn it from one of the top researchers in the world, Dr. Koji Tanabe.

He's a leading stem cell scientist, and his work has helped to shape the modern field of cellular reprogramming.

He worked in the Nobel laureate, Dr. Shinya Yamanaka's lab at Kyoto University, and he served as the second author of this 2007 landmark paper that reported how we can generate and make human induced pluripotent stem cells.

Those are also called iPSCs.

And, um, eight years he spent at Kyoto University.

He did all of this foundational research, which kind of helped discover the biology of how mature cells can be transformed backwards in time into their pluripotent state.

He also did a postdoc fellowship at Stanford, where he studied cellular reprogramming and including conversion of cells into neural lineages.

So you can reverse age these cells to babies and then turn them into neurons.

He founded iPeace in 2015.

He's a founder and CEO of iPeace.

That's spelled I and then the word peace, P-E-A-C-E.

And he's working to make customized clinical grade iPSCs more accessible for regenerative medicine and disease in your own personalized future cell therapies.

So Dr. Tanabe's research really is at the intersection of stem cell biology, longevity science, and regenerative medicine, everything that you guys are hearing about going on in the news right now, where labs are reverse aging cells and reprogramming genetics.

Thank you so much for coming all the way from Japan.

Thank you very much for giving us these opportunities.

This is fascinating work.

So tell me a little bit about yourself and how did you find yourself in the lab of Shinya Yamanaka.

[upbeat music] Well, hello, hello, guys.

You're listening to Beauty Bytes with Dr. K: Secrets of a Plastic Surgeon.

And today's podcast is fascinating.

If you don't know what Yamanaka factors are, we're gonna learn that, and we're gonna learn it from one of the top researchers in the world, Dr. Koji Tanabe.

He's a leading stem cell scientist, and his work has helped to shape the modern field of cellular reprogramming.

He worked in the Nobel laureate, Dr. Shinya Yamanaka's lab at Kyoto University, and he served as the second author of this 2007 landmark paper that reported how we can generate and make human induced pluripotent stem cells.

Those are also called iPSCs.

And, um, eight years he spent at Kyoto University.

He did all of this foundational research, which kind of helped discover the biology of how mature cells can be transformed backwards in time into their pluripotent state.

He also did a postdoc fellowship at Stanford, where he studied cellular reprogramming and including conversion of cells into neural lineages.

So you can reverse age these cells to babies and then turn them into neurons.

He founded iPeace in 2015.

He's a founder and CEO of iPeace.

That's spelled I and then the word peace, P-E-A-C-E.

And he's working to make customized clinical grade iPSCs more accessible for regenerative medicine and disease in your own personalized future cell therapies.

So Dr. Tanabe's research really is at the intersection of stem cell biology, longevity science, and regenerative medicine, everything that you guys are hearing about going on in the news right now, where labs are reverse aging cells and reprogramming genetics.

Thank you so much for coming all the way from Japan.

Thank you very much for giving us these opportunities.

This is fascinating work.

So tell me a little bit about yourself and how did you find yourself in the lab of Shinya Yamanaka.