The Lasker Foundation announced its 2026 awards on September 9 in New York. The prizes, often called America's Nobel prizes, went to researchers who explained how sleep is regulated, a team that built a new kind of hemophilia treatment, and an advocate who changed how Parkinson's disease research is funded.
Sleep and narcolepsy
Emmanuel Mignot of Stanford University School of Medicine and Masashi Yanagisawa of the University of Tsukuba share the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award. Their work identified the molecular system that controls sleep and explained what goes wrong in narcolepsy, a disorder that causes sudden sleep attacks.
Yanagisawa said earlier studies of sleep involved damaging parts of the brain and watching what changed, with no description of the mechanism underneath. He said the converging findings from the two labs became a convincing account of how sleep is regulated.
A treatment for hemophilia
Kunihiro Hattori, Takehisa Kitazawa and Tomoyuki Igawa of Chugai Pharmaceutical receive the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award. The three researchers developed a bispecific antibody that mimics the missing clotting factor in people with hemophilia A, giving patients an alternative to frequent infusions of factor replacement therapy.
Public service
Michael J. Fox received the Lasker-Bloomberg Public Service Award for founding the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research and turning it into the largest nonprofit funder of Parkinson's science. Fox was diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson's in his late twenties and went public with his diagnosis in 1998. The disease affects about 10 million people worldwide.
The awards are watched closely as a signal for future Nobel Prizes in medicine, which several past Lasker winners have gone on to receive.