Masato Tanabe

Masato "Mas" Tanabe was a drug researcher at SRI International, where he spent 45 years studying steroid hormones, which are instrumental in combatting breast cancer and prostate cancer.

Education Tanabe graduated from the University of San Francisco 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.

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. Much of the work was sponsored by the National Institute of Health and Schering Plough, the latter of which has at least eight patents and 30 journal articles via work sponsored at SRI. 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". 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.