🇯🇵 JAPAN MAY BEAT THE WORLD TO STEM CELL CURES — PARKINSON’S, PARALYSIS, EVEN BLINDNESS
Japan is on the verge of turning science fiction into standard medicine.
After 20 years of research and over ¥110B in funding, its iPS-cell therapies (induced pluripotent stem cells) are… https://t.co/goxw8gnMGg pic.twitter.com/xJaWKWBEMQ
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) April 17, 2025
Illustration: Ricardo Santos; photographs: Ben Weller for Nature; Woodblock print: Utagawa Hiroshige (1831)
Japan is brimming with signs of an approaching medical revolution. Shiny white robots are tending dishes of cells, rows of incubators hum in new facilities, and a deluxe, plush-carpeted hospital is getting ready to welcome its first patients.
Building on the Nobel-prizewinning work of stem-cell scientist Shinya Yamanaka, researchers across the country are crafting cells into strips of retina, sheets of cardiac muscle or blobs of neurons, in the hope of treating blindness, mending hearts and reversing neurodegeneration. Results from early-stage clinical trials — some announced just in the past few weeks — suggest that the cells might actually be working to treat conditions as varied as Parkinson’s disease and spinal-cord injury.
Now, after nearly two decades of hard work and setbacks, many say that Japan is on the cusp of bringing these therapies to market.
Yamanaka, who runs a lab at Kyoto University, discovered in 2006 that adult cells could be reprogrammed into an embryonic-like state, capable of becoming practically any kind of tissue1. These induced pluripotent stem cells — or iPS cells — won Yamanaka the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2012, and propelled him to superstar status. They have become a symbol of the country’s global scientific aspirations.
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