Four Japanese scientists win prestigious U.S. Lasker Awards

Two scientists, Emmanuel Mignot from France and Masashi Yanagisawa from Japan, have been honored with the prestigious Albert Lasker prize for their groundbreaking work on narcolepsy. Their research, conducted in the 1990s using different methods, concluded that narcolepsy is caused by a missing brain chemical. This discovery has led to new treatments for the condition and advanced the field of sleep science.

Mignot, a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, spent a decade studying the canine genome to find the cause of narcolepsy, which he eventually discovered in 1999. Yanagisawa, affiliated with Tsukuba University in Japan, identified the neurotransmitter orexin, also known as hypocretin, which is absent in people and mice with narcolepsy.

This find, that narcolepsy is genetic in nature, revolutionized the study of sleep problems. Following years of research, a drug targeting orexin deficiency in people with Type 1 narcolepsy was approved this year in the US, China, and Japan. Despite the significant progress made, many questions about sleep and narcolepsy remain, including how the shift from sleep to wakefulness is triggered and what causes the sudden onset of sleep in people with the disorder.