The person is Grace Wade.
The discovery of the cause of narcolepsy was the subject of the prize.
The prize is called the breakthrough prize.
The cause of narcolepsy, a lifelong disorder in which people suddenly fall asleep and experience extreme daytime drowsiness, has been discovered by two scientists.
The top researchers in the fields of physics, mathematics, and life sciences are each given a prize of fifteen million dollars.
There are two people who have discovered the mechanism behind narcolepsy.
In the 1980's, Mignot and his colleagues started cross-breeding dogs in order to find genes related to the condition. People were saying it was crazy because the human genome hadn't been mapped. It took 10 years for it to pay off, but it was worth it.
His team was able to identify a coding for two brain cells. The lining of cells can be detected with the help of themembranereceptors. Changes in an animal's behavior can be caused by a cascade of responses triggered by certain molecule. It wasn't clear what the function of the new-found receptors was.
Around the same time, Yanagisawa and his colleagues were trying to identify the roles of hundreds ofreceptors by looking at which molecule activated them. They used extracts from animal brains and refining them until they were able to find out which specific peptides activated a certainreceptor. Their first hit was for thereceptor, which they found to respond to two previously unknown peptides called Orexin-A and Orexin-B.
The teamDisabling the gene that produced Orexin in mice and saw that these animals, which are normally nocturnal, occasionally collapsed into bouts of sleep. The mice were able to stay awake when they were injected with the drug.
These discoveries showed that the two types of orexin that normally bind to this receptor cause wakefulness. People with narcolepsy don't produce the drug.
The laboratories came from completely different directions.
It isn't entirely clear why people with narcolepsy don't produce anything, but a recent study has found that it may be an autoimmune condition in which the body's immune system attacks and kills cells in the brain
It has improved our understanding of sleep and spurred the development of new drugs to treat narcolepsy, which is estimated to affect 1 percent of the global population. None of the drugs have been approved so far. There will be a clinically available drug treatment within three or four years if everything goes well.
The development of AlphaFold and the discovery of a fundamental mechanism in cellular organisation were among the achievements of this year's breakthrough prize recipients.
The mathematics prize was won by Daniel Spielman for his contributions to theoretical computer science, while the fundamental physics prize went to Charles Bennett, David Deutsch, and Peter Shor.
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