'Every time it gets excited — boom — it collapses': How dogs with narcolepsy helped scientists understand the disorder

Many people are familiar with melatonin, a hormone that helps ready the body for sleep.

But there's another, lesser-known chemical in the brain, called orexin, that tips the scale in the other direction: waking the body up.

In 1999, two scientists independently uncovered the function of orexin and published papers about it.

Dr.

Masashi Yanagisawa , a molecular biologist and physician now at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, came across orexin while studying the interaction of receptors and chemicals in the brain.

Dr.

Emmanuel Mignot , now the director of the Stanford Center for Narcolepsy, homed in on orexin while studying narcoleptic dogs. (His Chihuahua, named Watson, has narcolepsy, and he previously had another dog with the condition, named Bear.) This year, the pair of researchers won the coveted Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for this fundamental finding that helped reshape our understanding of sleep.

Their work has since led to the development of drugs for insomnia and narcolepsy.

Yanagisawa told Live Science that, at the start of his research career, he didn't expect to end up studying sleep.

Mignot, on the other hand, had an early interest in understanding narcolepsy so that better treatments for the neurological disorder could be developed.

Live Science spoke with Mignot about the discovery of orexin and how the field might progress in the future.

Nicoletta Lanese: What initially drew you to studying narcolepsy? Dr.

Emmanuel Mignot: There were three things that attracted me to narcolepsy: Number one, it was a human problem.

It was already known [at the time] that it was not super rare.