Four Japanese scientists take Lasker Awards for orexin sleep work and Hemlibra

The Lasker Foundation on Wednesday gave its basic medical research award to Masashi Yanagisawa, 66, a professor at the University of Tsukuba, and Emmanuel Mignot of the Stanford University School of Medicine. The pair, working on separate tracks, identified orexin, a brain peptide that keeps people awake, and tied its loss to narcolepsy.

The Lasker-DeBakey clinical award went to three scientists at Chugai Pharmaceutical: Kunihiro Hattori, Tomoyuki Igawa and Takehisa Kitazawa. They built emicizumab, sold as Hemlibra, a bispecific antibody that does the job of factor VIII in people with haemophilia A. Michael J. Fox received the public-service award for Parkinson's advocacy.

Lasker prizes are often read as a shortlist for a later Nobel. The foundation has now put sleep chemistry and a clotting antibody on that list in the same year, and it has put four Japanese names on the citation.

How orexin was found twice

Yanagisawa was chasing orphan receptors, proteins in the brain whose triggering chemicals were unknown. In 1998 he found the peptide that fitted one of those receptors and named the system around feeding and arousal. Mice engineered to lack orexin fell into sudden sleep attacks that looked like human narcolepsy.

Mignot came from the clinic. He wanted to know why some people collapse into sleep. His work showed that narcolepsy is, in most cases, a loss of the neurons that make orexin. The two results locked together. Drugs that block orexin receptors now exist as sleep medicines. They aim to bring on sleep without the dependence pattern of older hypnotics. Drugs that replace or mimic orexin are the other half of the pipeline, aimed at narcolepsy itself.

Yanagisawa said the honour was more than he deserved and that sleep science has not drawn much attention. The citation is a push for a field that still treats insomnia and narcolepsy with tools that were designed for other problems.

An antibody that stands in for a missing factor

Haemophilia A is a genetic failure to make enough factor VIII, the protein that grabs two other clotting factors and starts a chain that stops bleeding. Severe patients bleed into joints. The old treatment was intravenous factor VIII every two or three days. Some patients then made antibodies that killed the infused factor, leaving them with no working drug.

Hattori proposed in 2000 that a specially shaped antibody could hold the same two partners that factor VIII holds. Kitazawa and Igawa spent more than a decade screening tens of thousands of candidates. Hemlibra is given under the skin, as rarely as once every four weeks, and it still works in many patients who have inhibitors against factor VIII. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved it in 2017. More than 100 countries have followed. Chugai says more than 30,000 patients now use it.

Hattori said he had taken pride in the medicine and had not expected a prize of this rank. The clinical citation is unusual in that all three winners sit inside one company rather than a university lab.

What the prizes signal

Two practical pipelines now have a public marker. Orexin drugs will be judged on whether they can treat narcolepsy at the cause, not only block wakefulness at night. Hemlibra will be judged on how far the same design idea can be pushed into other missing-protein diseases.

The Lasker board did not invent either result. It chose to put them on the same stage in 2026, with a Japanese majority on the scientific list and a Hollywood advocate on the public one. That is the news from Wednesday. The biology has been on the shelf for years. The recognition arrived in a single announcement.