by Tanvi Ambekar
World Editor
On Sept. 9, the Lasker Foundation announced the winners for the 2026 Lasker Awards, often nicknamed “America’s Nobel Prizes.” Since its inception in 1942, the Lasker Foundation has distributed over 400 prizes in four categories: the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (for a discovery that opens up a new area of biomedical science), the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award (for an advancement that improves the lives of thousands of people), the Lasker-Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science (for research accomplishments that inspire feelings of awe and respect), and the Lasker-Bloomberg Public Service Award (for advancements that raise awareness or substantially benefit society in some way).
This year, the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award honored Emmanuel Mignot and Masashi Yanagisawa for their discovery of orexin, a brain peptide that maintains wakefulness and whose mutations cause narcolepsy. Before Mignot and Yanagisawa’s work, there was no molecular or genetic description of sleep regulation at all. Now, however, this identification opens the door to a whole new class of insomnia and narcolepsy drugs, the first of which the FDA approved in August. It fits the award’s concept perfectly: recognizing a fundamental discovery that opened a brand-new area of science.
The Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award went to Kunihiro Hattori, Tomoyuki Igawa, and Takehisa Kitazawa from Chugai Pharmaceutical Co. in Tokyo, Japan. Together, they invented an antibody that replaces a dysfunctional blood clotting factor responsible for the uncontrollable bleeding in hemophilia A. Hemophilia A is caused by two separate blood clotting factors being unable to form an important protein complex, so Hattori launched an effort in 2000 to build an antibody that would bind them together itself. The team synthesized a drug called Hemlibra that virtually eliminated bleeding in hemophilia A patients. The medication is now available in over 120 countries and has impacted over 30,000 people globally.
Finally, Michael J. Fox took home the Lasker-Bloomberg Public Service Award for his advocacy in the battle against Parkinson’s Disease. Fox first learned about his Parkinson’s after starring in the hit trilogy Back to the Future. Ten years later, he started the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research to help find a cure. His foundation is now the largest funder of Parkinson’s research in the world, having donated over 3 billion dollars to various organizations.
The winners, who accepted their award on Sept. 17 at the Lasker Foundation headquarters in New York, join a distinguished group of some of the most influential scientific contributors of their time. These discoveries have the ability to change the world, and as this year’s breakthroughs show, they are well on their way already.
(Sources: Drug Discovery News, Lasker Foundation, Live Science, PNAS Updates, PR Newswire)