Professor Masafumi Yanagisawa, director of the International Institute for Integrative Sleep Medicine at the University of Tsukuba, has been selected for the life science category of the Breakthrough Prize, an international scientific award established by the founders of Google in the United States.His contribution to the development of therapeutic drugs for hypersomnia and insomnia through the discovery of proteins involved in the regulation of sleep and wakefulness was highly evaluated.
According to the International Institute for Integrative Sleep Medicine at the University of Tsukuba, in 1998, Professor Yanagisawa discovered orexin, a protein related to the control of sleep and wakefulness, and elucidated the pathology of hypersomnia narcolepsy.The fact that the results of this research led to the development of new drugs for hypersomnia and insomnia was highly evaluated, and he and his colleague Professor Emmanuel Migno of Stanford University in the United States were selected as laureates.
The Breakthrough Prize was established in 2012 by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, US Meta Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, and China Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma. consists of three departments.The prize money of 3 million dollars (approximately 300 million yen) will be split 4/3,000 with collaborator Professor Migno.
The Japanese winners are Shinya Yamanaka, honorary director of the Kyoto University Center for iPS Cell Research and Application, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Yoshinori Ohsumi, honorary professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and the Lasker Prize in Medicine, Kyoto University Graduate School of Science. He is the fourth person to be appointed after Professor Kazutoshi Mori of the department.
