S/ Yanagisawa Masashi, University of Tsukuba Professor / It is a tremendous honor and delight to be recognized in this way. I am very happy that the field of basic sleep research itself was able to receive this award. I truly hope that sleep research will gain momentum from here on.

Professor Yanagisawa Masashi of the University of Tsukuba won this year’s Lasker Award for basic medical research.

Lasker Awards of the United States are often regarded as a stepping stone to the Nobel Prize.

Yanagisawa is known as a leading authority in sleep research.

He discovered orexin, a chemical messenger in the brain that regulates sleep and wakefulness cycles.

The award recognized that his discovery of orexin helped uncover the mechanism behind narcolepsy and led to the development of new treatments for sleep disorders.

Attention is now focused on whether Yanagisawa will be selected for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, scheduled to be announced in Sweden in October.