He was born in 1958, the son of Maria Sanak (née Policht), later a judge of the
Supreme Administrative Court of Poland, and Stanisław Sanak. He attended the
Bartłomiej Nowodworski High School, where he passed
matura in 1977. In 1983, he graduated with distinction from the
Medical Academy in Kraków. That year, he started to work as a junior assistant at the Department of Medical Genetics at the Pediatrics Institute in Kraków. In 1988, he took a three-month internship at
Harvard University. In 1991, he received a one-year scholarship from the
Ministry of Scientific Research and Technology of the Republic of France, in the unit U-12 of the
Institute of Medical Research (INSERM), located in the
Necker Hospital in Paris and headed by Arnold Munnich and Marie-Claude Hors-Cayla. In 1989, he received the second degree of specialization in
pediatrics with distinction. In the following years, he worked as a pediatrician. In 1993, he obtained a
Ph.D. at the
Jagiellonian University, under the supervision of Jacek J. Pietrzyk. His doctoral thesis focused on the
congenital disorders in children, taking into account the distribution of
atmospheric pollution with
heavy metals. Between 1993–2005 he worked as an assistant professor at the
Institute of Pharmacology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, at the Department of Brain Biochemistry headed by
Jerzy Vetulani. Since 1995, he also worked at the
Jagiellonian University Medical College (CMUJ), at the Department of Allergy and Immunology and as Head of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Department of Internal Diseases, running research mostly in the fields of
genetics and
molecular biology. In 1997, he spent two months in the
Swiss Institute of Allergy and Asthma Research in Davos. In 1998, he re-visited Harvard, making a two-month stay. He obtained the postdoctoral degree in medical sciences in the field of
clinical genetics in 2001. In 2005, he obtained a specialization in clinical genetics, and in 2007 – a specialization in laboratory medical genetics. In 2007, he received the title of
professor of
medical sciences. He was the author of the discovery of the
genetic polymorphism of the promoter region of the gene of the
leukotriene C4 synthase; and he participated in establishing the relationship between
genetic overexpression caused by the presence of the altered
allele of that gene and the overproduction of cysteinyl leukotrienes in
bronchial asthma. For this last discovery, in 1997 he received the Lancet Investigators Award of
The Lancet magazine, together with
Andrzej Szczeklik. In 2023 he was elected a member of the
Academia Europaea. ==Personal life==