Professor wins prize for discovering causes of narcolepsy, California university says

A Craig Reynolds Professor of Sleep Medicine has been crowned the winner of a 2023 Breakthrough Prize in Life Science at Stanford University Medical School in California.

Emmanuel Mignot has been awarded $3 million for discovering causes of narcolepsy that may lead to future sleep disorder treatments, according to a Sept. 22 news release from Stanford University Medicine.

“When I started studying narcolepsy, people thought it was very rare. Nobody knew about it,” Mignot said in the release.

He initially became interested in studying narcolepsy to better understand sleep and help patients with a disease that he believed “no one cared about,” he said.

Narcolepsy is a neurological disorder where those with the disease possess excessive daytime sleepiness to an overwhelming point, according to the Mayo Clinic. It makes it difficult to “stay awake for long periods of time,” the clinic said, and can disrupt daily life. It affects about 1 in 2,000 people, according to Stanford School of Medicine.

“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,” Lloyd Minor, dean of Stanford School of Medicine, said in the release.

Mignot first began studying the neurological disorder in 1986 when he asked the French government to send him to Stanford Medicine as part of his mandatory military service. This allowed him to study a drug for the disorder that was made by a French company, school officials said.

After some experience in studying narcolepsy, Mignot understood the problem and wanted to solve it, according to the release. He resigned from his position as a professor in France and stayed at Stanford.

From dogs to people

In 1989, he approached the neurological disorder by trying to discover the gene that causes narcolepsy in dogs.

“Probably it was a little bit of naivete because I was not a geneticist. I was trained as a psychiatrist, but I became a geneticist,” he said in the release. “It took me 10 years to find the gene.”

After discovering orexin, which can be used to control a receptor for a sleep neurotransmitter, Mignot came to the conclusion that the cause of the disorder was a disruption of orexin, according to the release.

He will share the prize with Masashi Yanagisawa of the University of Tsukuba in Japan. Around the same time, he concluded the same findings, according to Stanford.

The following year, Mignot showed that orexin, which “promotes wakefulness” in humans was not present in the brains of patients with the neurological disorder, Stanford officials said. His team was able to show the genetic correlation between humans with narcolepsy and autoimmune processes which “lead to orexin deficiency.”

Behind the prize

The Breakthrough Prizes were founded by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan, Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri Milner and Anne Wojcicki, according to the release.

Stanford University’s Breakthrough Prize recognizes scientists who have major breakthroughs in their field of study, according to the news release.

Stanford University is about 40 miles south of San Francisco.