The Annual Lasker-DeBakey award is worth looking out for

 The Lasker-DeBakey award, usually anounced in September, recognises groundbreaking research that has led to pardigm changing progress in Medicine.

Take the last 3 years- in 2024, it was awarded to scientists who described GLP-1 analogoes, leading to the dizztying rise of the likes of Semaglutide and Tirzepatide into mass market use.

In 2025, the award went to people who pioneered the use of disease modifiers for cystic fibrosis. Thus, subjects with deltaF508 or around 250 other mutations, who had hitherto faced an early death by their early twenties, can now expect to live to 65 and potentially beyond on medications such as Trikafta, a combination of Ivacaftor, Elexacaftor and Tezacaftor.

This year's award has gone to the two scientists from Stanford & Japan, who discovered the role of orexin in narcolepsy, type 1. Briefly, this is a condition that leads to people falling asleep very easily during inactivity, for example, in front of their PC, and transitioning straight into REM sleep. One phenotype of the latter phenomenon is cataplexy, where sufferers develop short lived muscular paralysis during emotional upsets.

The two scientists found that narcolepsy type 1 was caused by a lack of orexin, also called hypocretin, normally pruced by the lateral hypothalanus.

Thus, we now have FDA approved orexin agonists such as oveporexton, acting on one of its receptors- orexin receptor 2- for narcolepsy type1. Conversely orexin receptor blockers such as deridorexant, have been in use for insomnia for several years, and have the advantage of having no withdrawal symptoms, unlike, say, benzodiazepines. They can be stopped immediately if so wished.