Ameritec Prize

 

News release For Immediate Release October 3, 2005     Professors Toshihide Yamashita and Zhigang He to Receive 2005 Ameritec Prize for Paralysis Research   The Ameritec Foundation announced today that Dr. Toshihide Yamashita of Chiba University in Japan and Dr. Zhigang He of Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, have been selected as the co-recipients of the 2005 Ameritec Prize for significant accomplishment toward a cure for paralysis.  The Prize recognizes Drs. Yamashita’s and He’s significant contribution in the "demonstration that multiple myelin inhibitors of axonal regeneration mediate their actions by converging on a signaling pathway involving members of the p75 receptor family.” Drs. Yamashita and He will receive the Prize at at a special recognition dinner in Washington DC on November 13, 2005.  The Ameritec Foundation is a charitable, non-profit public benefit foundation based in Covina, California.  It provides funding for the $40,000 prize. The winner is selected by a Scientific Advisory Board of internationally known medical researchers. The link of inhibitory signals to the p75 receptor grew out of work by Dr. Yamashita with previous Ameritec Prize winner Dr. Yves Barde, in which they found an unexpected interaction of p75 with RhoA, a regulator of the actin cytoskeleton.   In a seminal piece of lateral thinking, Dr. Yamashita and his colleagues explored whether this link of p75 to RhoA might be relevant to the actions of Myelin Associated Glycoprotein (MAG), a key myelin-derived inhibitor of neurite growth.  Unexpectedly, their experiments showed that p75 is actually required for MAG’s inhibitory effects, and they went on to provide evidence that p75 transduces the inhibitory signal. Dr. He set out to identify novel myelin-derived inhibitors of neurite extension.  Through biochemical and biological characterization of lipid-anchored proteins in myelin, he and his colleagues first identified Oligodendrocyte Myelin Glycoprotein (OMpg) as a novel myelin-derived inhibitor, and made the surprising discovery that it binds NgR, a Nogo66 receptor identified by previous Ameritec Prize winner Dr. Steven Strittmatter.  Work by Dr. He and previous Ameritec prize winner Dr. Marie Filbin, as well as by Dr. Strittmatter, had shown that MAG also binds NgR.  Putting together those observations with Dr. Yamashita’s work, Dr. He and colleagues went on to show that NgR and p75 form a receptor complex for all three of these inhibitors.  The finding that NgR and p75 form a receptor complex for MAG was also made by previous Ameritec prize-winner Dr. Mu-ming Poo and his colleagues.  The identification by Dr. He of a third myelin-derived inhibitor, and his demonstration that all three inhibitors (MAG, Nogo, and OMgp) can signal via a NgR-p75 complex, provided a key generalization of Dr. Yamashita’s findings.  Collectively, this work has focused attention on this signaling axis as a promising target for therapeutic interventions to stimulate axonal regeneration following spinal cord injury. Dr. Yamashita was born in Okayama, Japan and earned his undergraduate degree in Medicine in 1990 from Osaka University Medical School. He worked as a neurosurgeon for 4 years, and then started research as a graduate student. He completed Ph.D. training in 1997 in the Department of Anatomy and Neuroscience at Osaka University with mentorship from Dr. Masaya Tohyama. He then moved to Max-Planck Institute of Neurobiology, Martinsried for postdoctoral training with Dr. Yves-Alain Barde. Under the supervision of Dr. Yves-Alain Barde, he identified RhoA as an interactor of the p75 receptor and found that neurotrophins binding to the p75 receptor inactivates RhoA. He became an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka University in 2001, and moved to the Department of Neurobiology, Graduate School of Medicine, Chiba University as a Professor and Chairman in 2003. As a group leader in recent several years, he has conducted and directed research on regeneration of the central nervous system. Dr. He was born in Jiangsu, China and earned his undergraduate degree in Medicine in 1984 from Nanjing Medical University. He completed Ph.D. training in 1996 in the Department of Genetics at University of Toronto with mentorship from Dr. James Ingles.  He received the Connaught Scholarship, Medical Research Council of Canada Studentship and Ontario Graduate Scholarship. He then moved to the University of California, San Francisco for postdoctoral training with Dr. Marc Tessier-Lavigne in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Department of Anatomy. Under the supervision of Dr.Tessier-Lavinge, he identified neuropilin-1 as a receptor of an axonal repulsive molecule Semaphorin3A. In 1999, he became an Assistant Professor in the Division of Neuroscience at Children’s Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School. Since then, his lab has been studying the cellular and molecular mechanisms of axon regeneration.   FOR FUTHER INFORMATION:  Contact Bob Yant, Ameritec Prize Administrator, at 949 673-8474  Copyright © 2006 [Ameritec Foundation]. All rights reserved.