Four Japanese scientists win prestigious U.S. Lasker Awards

Four Japanese researchers won a prestigious U.S. medical science award — seen as a precursor to a Nobel Prize — on Wednesday for their work on a sleep-regulating brain chemical and an antibody therapy for hemophilia A patients. The basic medical research category of the Lasker Awards went to Masashi Yanagisawa, a professor at University of Tsukuba, who shared the honor with Emmanuel Mignot at Stanford University School of Medicine, for identifying orexin, a brain peptide that maintains wakefulness. Their separate discoveries have led to the development of medicines that block orexin receptors to induce natural sleep, while avoiding dependence or tolerance that often come with traditional sleep aids.