By Nina Bai
Emmanuel Mignot, MD, PhD, the Craig Reynolds Professor of Sleep Medicine, is the winner of a 2023 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. He will share the $3 million prize with Masashi Yanagisawa, MD, PhD, of the University of Tsukuba for discovering the causes of narcolepsy and paving the way for new treatments for sleep disorders.
“I became interested in narcolepsy because I thought it was a key to understanding sleep, and because it had this human dimension of trying to help patients with this disease that nobody cared about,” Mignot said. “When I started studying narcolepsy, people thought it was very rare. Nobody knew about it.”
The Breakthrough Prize recognizes top scientists for their game-changing discoveries in the fields of life sciences, fundamental physics and mathematics. Nearly $16 million was awarded this year.
“For so many years, the neurological mechanisms that cause narcolepsy were a complete mystery to the medical community,” said Lloyd Minor, MD, dean of the Stanford School of Medicine. “Dr. Mignot’s research not only unearthed the protein at the center of this mystery but also led to effective treatments and therapies for people suffering from the condition. Through his brilliant work, Dr. Mignot forever changed the field of sleep medicine and, in doing so, opened the door for more discoveries across a variety of neurodegenerative diseases.”