Lasker Award 2026
Meet orexin, the brain’s stay-awake signal
Emmanuel Mignot and Masashi Yanagisawa share the 2026 Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for discovering orexin, a brain signal that keeps us awake. They showed that losing it causes narcolepsy, a disorder of sudden sleep attacks.
· USA and Japan
On 9 September 2026, the Lasker Foundation announced that Emmanuel Mignot of Stanford University School of Medicine and Masashi Yanagisawa of the University of Tsukuba will receive the 2026 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award.
Remarkably, they reached the same answer by completely different routes. Masashi Yanagisawa was searching for molecules that switch on “orphan” receptors in the brain, and found peptides he named orexins. Mice bred to lack orexin had sudden night-time collapses that looked like human narcolepsy.
Emmanuel Mignot studied dogs with inherited narcolepsy and found changes in the gene for an orexin receptor. He went on to show that most people with narcolepsy have lost the ability to make orexin, probably because of an autoimmune reaction to an infection.
Why it matters
Narcolepsy affects at least 1 in 2,000 people in the United States, and many are still undiagnosed.
Their discovery has already led to new medicines: orexin-blocking drugs for insomnia, and an orexin-activating drug for narcolepsy that the US FDA approved in August 2026.
