Emmanuel Mignot at Stanford University and Masashi Yanagisawa at Tsubasa University are sleep researchers who recently discovered the main cause of narcolepsy, a chronic disease that causes extreme drowsiness and attacks on sleep during the daytime. 

Narcolepsy can cause problems in daily life. You can feel tired at any time during the day, which would interfere with your study or work. Therefore, discovering the main cause of narcolepsy can help many patients by developing treatments and ways to prevent it.

First, they studied dogs to find the gene that causes narcolepsy, and after 10 years, Emmanuel Mignot found orexin, a neuropeptide that controls sleeping neurotransmitters that promotes wakefulness. From this discovery, Mignot and Yanagisawa found that narcolepsy was caused when the production of orexin was disturbed or when they were not produced.

Mignot and Yanagisawa were able to get the Breakthrough Prize 2023 in life science for their discovery. The Breakthrough Prize awards scientists who have made scientific advances through