Three scientists win $500,000 Albany Prize

ALBANY, N.Y., March 16 (UPI) -- Three scientists who work in isolating human stem cells won the 11th annual Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research, officials say.

Elaine Fuchs, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at The Rockefeller University in New York City; James A. Thomson of the Morgridge Institute for Research in Madison, Wis. and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health; and Dr. Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan and the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease in San Francisco are co-recipients of the $500,000 prize.

The prize -- the largest U.S. award in medicine and science -- was established in 2000 by the late Morris "Marty" Silverman to honor scientists whose work has demonstrated significant outcomes that offer medical value of national or international importance.

"Diabetes, Parkinson's disease, cancer, spinal cord injury -- the solutions to these debilitating diseases and many, many others that plague humans might very well be found through the science of stem cells," James J. Barba, chief executive officer of Albany Medical Center, says in a statement.

Yamanaka and Thomson are credited with discovering how to genetically re-program adult human cells back to an embryonic state. These so-called induced pluripotent stem cells, which share nearly all the characteristics of embryonic stem cells can be made in limitless supply.

This discovery, made separately in each researcher's lab and reported in 2007, was hailed as a major scientific breakthrough, Barba says.