U.S. scientists win prize for discoveries on narcolepsy

WASHINGTON Kyodo American and Japanese scientists won a U.S. Breakthrough Prize for their discoveries that shed light on the cause of narcolepsy, a sleep disorder that makes people suddenly drowsy in the day.

One of the $3 million prizes in life sciences went to Emmanuel Mignot of the Stanford University School of Medicine and Masashi Yanagisawa of the University of Tsukuba for their research programs that have contributed to the creation of sleep-inducing drugs.

Breakthrough prizes, established by people like Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, are given for prominent work in life sciences, mathematics and fundamental physics.

Yanagisawa said he is happy that research on sleep is being recognized.

He said that I will work to solve fundamental riddles such as how we transition between sleep and waking and why living things sleep.

Yanagisawa discovered orexin, a protein in the brain and determined it helps maintain awakeness through experiments using mice in the 1990s. There were findings regarding orexin that led to the development of sleeping drugs.

Mignot discovered a genetic mutation that causes narcolepsy in dogs. He found that immune system cells can attack those producing orexin in humans, leading to the disorder as a result.