2013 Wantanabe Award Winner Tadataka Yamada

2013 Wantanabe Award Winner Tadataka Yamada2023-03-31T09:25:47-04:00

Tadataka Yamada

Tadataka (Tachi) Yamada, MD, received the first Watanabe Award in 2013. He addressed fellow translational scientists during the fifth annual meeting of the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute, “CTSI 2.0: A New Chapter for a Changing World.”

Yamada was the Executive Vice-President, Chief Medical & Scientific Officer and a Board Member of Takeda Pharmaceuticals. He was responsible for all of Takeda’s research and development activities and chaired the Corporate Management Operating Committee, overseeing all investments in research and development, business development and in-licensing. He was formerly President of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Global Health Program. In this capacity he oversaw grants totaling over $9 billion in programs directed at applying technologies to address major health challenges of the developing world including TB, HIV, malaria and other infectious diseases, malnutrition and maternal and child health. Before joining the Gates Foundation, Yamada was Chairman, Research and Development and a Member of the Board of Directors of GlaxoSmithKline.

A scientist and scholar in gastroenterology, Yamada is the author of more than 150 original manuscripts on the subject and is the editor of The Textbook of Gastroenterology. The studies undertaken by Yamada and his collaborators led to basic discoveries in the post-translational processing and biological activation of peptide hormones, the structure and function of receptors for hormones regulating gastric acid secretion, and the regulation of genes involved in the acid secretory process.

Yamada died in August 2021.

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