14 Facts About Masashi Yanagisawa

Masashi Yanagisawa is a Japanese-American molecular biologist and physician, famous for his discovery of the hormone endothelin and the neuropeptide orexin, the absence of which is the cause of narcolepsy.

Masashi Yanagisawa is currently the Director of the International Institute for Integrative Sleep Medicine, University of Tsukuba, and an adjunct professor at the Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.

Masashi Yanagisawa's father was a surgeon and, thanks to his background in electrical and electronic engineering, an electrophysiology researcher.

Masashi Yanagisawa graduated from Musashi Junior and Senior High School in 1979, and entered the University of Tsukuba to study medicine.

Immediately after obtaining his PhD, Yanagisawa started his career as a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Pharmacology of the University of Tsukuba.

Masashi Yanagisawa began as an associate professor at the Department of Molecular genetics, was promoted to full professor in 1996, and endowed with the Patrick E Haggerty Distinguished Chair in Basic Biomedical Science in 1998.

Masashi Yanagisawa returned to Japan in 2012 to found and direct the International Institute for Integrative Sleep Medicine at the University of Tsukuba, which was established under the World Premier International Research Center Initiative by Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

Masashi Yanagisawa was an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute during his time working full-time at UTSW.

Masashi Yanagisawa is most well known for his discovery of the hormone endothelin and the neuropeptide orexin.

Masashi Yanagisawa then published a number of reports on the function and regulation of endothelin, including working with Takeshi Sakurai to identify the receptor for endothelin.

Masashi Yanagisawa kept studying endothelin after moving to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in the United States, for example discovering one of the mechanisms to activate endothelin and that a mutation in endothelin receptor can cause Hirschsprung's disease.

In 1998, again teaming up with Takeshi Sakurai, who has moved to the United States as a postdoctoral fellow at UTSW, Masashi Yanagisawa connected two orphan GPCRs with a family of neuropeptides as their ligands.

Masashi Yanagisawa's team identified the phosphorylation and dephosphorylation of 80 proteins as a major regulation mechanism of the sleep cycle in mice.

Masashi Yanagisawa is married, and is a Baptist Christian since his second year of PhD.