Masato "Mas" Tanabe was a drug researcher at

SRI International SRI International (SRI) is a nonprofit organization, nonprofit scientific research, scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California, United States. It was established in 1946 by trustees of Stanford Univer ...

, where he spent 45 years studying

steroid hormone A steroid hormone is a steroid that acts as a hormone. Steroid hormones can be grouped into two classes: corticosteroids (typically made in the adrenal cortex, hence ''cortico-'') and sex steroids (typically made in the gonads or placenta). Wit ...

s, which are instrumental in combatting

breast cancer Breast cancer is a cancer that develops from breast tissue. Signs of breast cancer may include a Breast lump, lump in the breast, a change in breast shape, dimpling of the skin, Milk-rejection sign, milk rejection, fluid coming from the nipp ...

and

prostate cancer Prostate cancer is the neoplasm, uncontrolled growth of cells in the prostate, a gland in the male reproductive system below the bladder. Abnormal growth of the prostate tissue is usually detected through Screening (medicine), screening tests, ...

Education

Tanabe graduated from the

University of San Francisco The University of San Francisco (USF) is a Private university, private Society of Jesus, Jesuit university in San Francisco, California, United States. Founded in 1855, it has nearly 9,000 students pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees ...

in 1947 with a degree in chemistry; his thesis was "Studies in the hydroaromatic series". Tanabe would go on to study under professor William G. Dauben at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

Career

Tanabe was program manager of Steroid Chemistry group, then director of SRI's Bio-Organic Chemistry Laboratory for much of his career, and later the director of SRI's Pharmaceutical Chemistry group. In 1967, he was on a team that discovered Eschenmoser-Tanabe fragmentation. Much of the work was sponsored by the

National Institute of Health The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in 1887 and is part of the United States Department of Health and Human Servic ...

and

Schering Plough Schering-Plough Corporation was an American pharmaceutical company. It was originally the U.S. subsidiary of the German company Schering AG, which was founded in 1851 by Ernst Christian Friedrich Schering. As a result of nationalization, it becam ...

, the latter of which has at least eight patents and 30 journal articles via work sponsored at SRI. Other notable accomplishments include the use of

stable isotopes The term stable isotope has a meaning similar to stable nuclide, but is preferably used when speaking of nuclides of a specific element. Hence, the plural form stable isotopes usually refers to isotopes of the same element. The relative abundan ...

to study metabolism. He inserted

Carbon-13 Carbon-13 (13C) is a natural, stable isotope of carbon with a nucleus containing six protons and seven neutrons. As one of the environmental isotopes, it makes up about 1.1% of all natural carbon on Earth. Detection by mass spectrometry A m ...

into antibiotics to demonstrate how microbes can assemble antibiotics to defend themselves, then used magnetic resonance spectroscopy to determine how the antibiotic was formed. His work resulted in the development of the steroid SR16234, which has been used to treat

. A compound discovered in a previous contract from NIH showed potential - it acted like "anti-estrogen" in the breasts and uterus but like normal estrogen elsewhere in the body, and were thus more "tissue-selective". A contract was proposed to

Taiho Pharmaceutical is a Japanese pharmaceutical company, and a subsidiary of Otsuka Holdings, which focuses on developing cancer treatments. Taiho, headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is an R&D-driven specialty pharma focusing on the three fields of oncology, allerg ...

in July 1996, and within six years and slightly under $3 million (an unusually short amount of time) two new drugs were discovered and tested on people (particularly people for which

tamoxifen Tamoxifen, sold under the brand name Nolvadex among others, is a selective estrogen receptor modulator used to prevent breast cancer in women and men. It is also being studied for other types of cancer. It has been used for Albright syndrome ...

has failed): SR16234 and SR16287. The first of those, SR16234, also inhibited the growth of blood vessels (

angiogenesis Angiogenesis is the physiological process through which new blood vessels form from pre-existing vessels, formed in the earlier stage of vasculogenesis. Angiogenesis continues the growth of the vasculature mainly by processes of sprouting and ...

) and accelerated the death of cancer cells (

apoptosis Apoptosis (from ) is a form of programmed cell death that occurs in multicellular organisms and in some eukaryotic, single-celled microorganisms such as yeast. Biochemistry, Biochemical events lead to characteristic cell changes (Morphology (biol ...

) and thus was particularly well suited to be an anti-cancer drug. As of August 2010, the drug had been through five Phase I and two Phase II studies, and Phase III studies are being planned.

Legacy

Tanabe was named an SRI Fellow in 1984 for his contributions to steroid hormone therapeutics, and to SRI's Alumni Hall of Fame in 2004. Tanabe worked with many SRI post-doctoral and international fellows; in addition, 45 Japanese scientists studied under him at SRI in Menlo Park, California under SRI's academic exchange program. As a result, he was awarded the Japanese Pharmaceutical Society's Distinguished Service Award on March 27, 2001. He is the first person outside Japan to receive that award.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Tanabe, Masato Living people SRI International people University of California, Berkeley alumni Year of birth missing (living people)