Yanagisawa, Mignot Win Lasker Award for 1999 Narcolepsy Breakthrough
Updated
Updated · The New York Times · Sep 9
Yanagisawa, Mignot Win Lasker Award for 1999 Narcolepsy Breakthrough
3 articles · Updated · The New York Times · Sep 9
Summary
Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award went to Masashi Yanagisawa and Emmanuel Mignot for discoveries that linked narcolepsy to the brain’s orexin system and reshaped sleep biology.
Back-to-back 1999 studies brought together Yanagisawa’s rodent work on orexins and Mignot’s research on inherited narcolepsy in dogs, revealing a root cause of the disorder.
1 in 2,000 people in the United States are affected by narcolepsy, and the Lasker Foundation said the findings also strengthened evidence that the immune system is involved in the human disease.
August approval of a new narcolepsy drug based on those insights highlights how the once-basic research has opened a major pharmaceutical push into sleep disorders.