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The Lasker Foundation announced the 2026 Lasker Awards on 9 September 2026, to be presented at a ceremony in New York City on 17 September.
The Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award went to Emmanuel Mignot of Stanford University and Masashi Yanagisawa of the University of Tsukuba, Japan, for identifying orexin as the brain peptide that maintains wakefulness and showing that its deficiency causes type 1 narcolepsy.
Mignot's group traced inherited canine narcolepsy to a mutation in the hypocretin receptor 2 gene, while Yanagisawa's group, screening for ligands of orphan receptors, identified the orexin peptides themselves; the two reports appeared a month apart.
The Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Science Award went to Kunihiro Hattori, Tomoyuki Igawa and Takehisa Kitazawa of Chugai Pharmaceutical for a bispecific antibody treatment for haemophilia A.
Michael J. Fox received the Lasker~Bloomberg Public Service Award for Parkinson's disease advocacy, and Lucy Shapiro of Stanford the Lasker~Koshland Special Achievement Award.
Orexin, also called hypocretin, is a brain peptide that holds the body in a waking state. When the neurons producing it are lost, the boundary between wakefulness and REM sleep collapses, producing sudden sleep attacks and cataplexy.
Simple Analogy: The switch that keeps the light on is gone, so the room flickers dark without warning.
American foundation that has conferred the Lasker Awards since 1945 across basic medical research, clinical medical science, public service and special achievement. More than 100 of its laureates have later received a Nobel Prize, giving the award its reputation as a predictor of the Nobel in Physiology or Medicine.
GS Paper 3 > Science and Technology > Developments in biotechnology and health
General Awareness > Awards and honours; science and current affairs
A brain peptide that maintains wakefulness and regulates entry into REM sleep; its deficiency causes type 1 narcolepsy.
Sudden loss of muscle tone triggered by strong emotion, the defining feature separating type 1 from type 2 narcolepsy.
An engineered antibody that binds two different targets at once, the basis of the haemophilia A therapy recognised by the 2026 clinical award.