Lasker Awards honour the discovery of orexin, a bispecific antibody for haemophilia A, and Parkinson's disease advocacy

The Lasker Foundation announced its 2026 awards on 9 September 2026. The Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award went to Emmanuel Mignot of Stanford University School of Medicine and Masashi Yanagisawa of the University of Tsukuba in Ibaraki, Japan. The citation reads: "For identification of orexin, a brain peptide that maintains wakefulness, and the discovery that orexin deficiency causes uncontrolled sleep in narcolepsy—revealing a key insight into the nature of sleep."

Mignot is the Craig Reynolds Professor in Sleep Medicine at Stanford Medicine and directs the Stanford Center for Narcolepsy. He began studying narcoleptic Dobermans in William Dement's laboratory in 1989 and spent roughly a decade positionally cloning the gene responsible, publishing in Cell in 1999 that canine narcolepsy is caused by mutations in the orexin receptor 2 gene.

Yanagisawa and Takeshi Sakurai isolated two peptides that activate orphan G-protein-coupled receptors, using brain chromatography, in 1998, and named them orexins. The same molecules were identified independently as hypocretins by Luis de Lecea at the Scripps Research Institute in 1998. In 1999 Yanagisawa created orexin-deficient mice that collapsed suddenly into REM sleep, mimicking human cataplexy.

Mignot described the decade-long gene hunt: "It was like bumping against a wall 20 times until the wall finally collapses." Of the result, he said: "That's the kind of discovery you make once in your entire life." Lloyd Minor, Dean of Stanford School of Medicine, said the work "illustrates the promise of curiosity-driven research." The two laureates share the honorarium attached to the basic research award.

The Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award went to Takehisa Kitazawa, Kunihiro Hattori and Tomoyuki Igawa, all of Chugai Pharmaceutical Co., for a "Bispecific antibody for treating hemophilia A." Their antibody bridges clotting Factors IXa and X, substituting for the missing Factor VIII and preventing severe bleeding without the need for factor infusions.

The Lasker-Bloomberg Public Service Award went to Michael J. Fox of New York for "Parkinson's disease research advocacy," recognising his work through The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research in empowering patients' voices and accelerating the search for improved therapies.

The 2026 awards are notable for their concentration of Japanese science. Four Japanese researchers were honoured across the basic and clinical awards: Yanagisawa in Tsukuba, and Kitazawa, Hattori and Igawa at Chugai.

Later work established that in most human cases orexin neurons are destroyed by autoimmunity involving HLA genetic susceptibility and viral triggers, which explained the surge of narcolepsy cases after the 2009 H1N1 pandemic and the Pandemrix vaccine.

The basic discovery has now closed a loop into the clinic. Oveporexton, the first orexin receptor 2 agonist, was approved by the FDA for narcolepsy type 1 on 5 August 2026, and its two phase 3 trials, co-authored by Mignot, were published in the New England Journal of Medicine on 9 September 2026, the same day the Lasker Awards were announced.

The Lasker Awards have been given since 1945 and are often described as America's Nobels. Each category carries an honorarium of USD 250,000. They are widely used as a Nobel predictor, and the Foundation reports that a large fraction of Lasker basic research laureates have subsequently received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

The awards were presented at the Lasker Foundation's ceremony in New York City in September 2026. Attention now turns to whether orexin agonism can be extended beyond narcolepsy to idiopathic hypersomnia, obstructive sleep apnoea and shift-work disorder.