10 years ago, the Japanese stem cell researcher Shinya Yamanaka received the Nobel Prize for Medicine. As it was also the 10^th anniversary of the annual meeting of the German Stem Cell Network (GSCN) and the 20^th anniversary of the Stem Cell Network NRW (StN), the President of the GSCN, Prof. Hans Schöler (Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine) and the Chairman of the StN Prof. Oliver Brüstle (University Hospital Bonn) jointly succeeded to invite the Nobel Prize winner to give a talk in Münster. In total, more than 500 researchers attended the conference.

Already ten years before Yamanaka's Nobel Prize, in 2002, the North Rhine-Westphalian network was founded. On September 14, 2022, the Stem Cell Network NRW, therefore, held an anniversary symposium embedded in the annual meeting of the GSCN. Firstly, Professor Elena Cattaneo from Milan provided insights into the treatment of Huntington's disease. Afterwards, the scientists Takashi Hiiragi (Hubrecht Institute, NL), Leo Kurian (University of Cologne), Julia Ladewig (ZI Mannheim) and Wolfgang Wagner (RWTH Aachen), each funded for five years between 2007 and 2013 by the state of NRW and the StN, presented their current research.

Five talks by rising star scientists from NRW also formed part of the anniversary program: Lea Berg (University of Bonn), Jay Gopalakrishnan (HHU Düsseldorf), Stefan Peischard (UK Münster), Christian Schröter (MPI Dortmund) and Annika Zink (HHU Düsseldorf) presented their current approaches, which ranged from basic research to applications in humans, for example in the treatment of Leigh syndrome. The anniversary symposium was rounded off by a lecture by Professor Dieter Birnbacher on the future of genome editing.

At the "Presidential Symposium" on September 15, Shinya Yamanaka presented current therapeutic approaches from his institute CiRA in Tokyo. Based on reprogrammed stem cells, the treatment of Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, ovarian cancer and other diseases is being researched there as part of clinical trials.

The next conference of the GSCN will be held in Ulm in the fall of 2023, and the next conference of the StN will be the 11^th International Meeting in Aachen on May 16-17, 2023.