Shinya Yamanaka, MD, PhD, a UCSF professor
of anatomy and a senior investigator with the UCSF - affiliated Gladstone Institutes, as well as the director
of the Center for iPSCell Research and Application (CiRA) and a
principal investigator at Kyoto University, shared the Nobel Prize in 2012 for discovering how to make iPS
cells from
skin cells using a handful
of protein «factors.»
These
cells are now thought to serve as the immune system's
principal sentinels in the
skin — when they detect damage signals from nearby wounded
skin cells, they summon other, non-
skin-resident immune
cells to the site
of the wound.