{"id":792782,"date":"2026-10-05T15:26:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-05T15:26:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/792782\/"},"modified":"2026-10-05T15:26:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-05T15:26:09","slug":"nobel-prize-in-medicine-2026-awarded-for-research-into-mysteries-of-brain-nobel-prizes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/792782\/","title":{"rendered":"Nobel prize in medicine 2026 awarded for research into mysteries of brain | Nobel prizes"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Nobel prize in physiology or medicine 2026 has been awarded to three scientists for their work investigating the mysteries of the brain.<\/p>\n

Karl Deisseroth of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Stanford University, Peter Hegemann of the Humboldt University of Berlin and Georg Nagel of the University of W\u00fcrzburg have been awarded the prize \u201cfor their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics\u201d.<\/p>\n

The Nobel assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden<\/a>, announced the winners on Monday. They will each receive an equal share of a prize of 12m Swedish kronor (about \u00a3900,000).<\/p>\n

The 2026 award is the 117th time the prize has been given. Of the 235 laureates \u2013 including the latest winners \u2013 only 14 have been women and none have been awarded to black scientists.<\/p>\n

In a nutshell the trio\u2019s research led to the development of a light-sensitive switch that can be used to control nerve cells in the living brain, switching them on or off.<\/p>\n

The discovery had its origins in research by Hegemann, who wanted to explore how a green alga called Chlamydomonas swam towards light. \u201cHe discovered that its eye spot contains a light-sensitive protein that converts light almost instantly into an electrical signal, allowing the alga to move,\u201d said Abdel El Manira, a professor of neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute and member of the Nobel assembly.<\/p>\n

Nagel and Hegemann identified the proteins, called channelrhodopsins, and working with frog egg cells they revealed that when the proteins were exposed to blue light, they allowed charged particles \u2013 or ions \u2013 to flow into the cell, producing an electrical impulse.<\/p>\n

Further work by the pair revealed that when the genetic instructions for one of the proteins were inserted into human or mouse kidney cells, those cells became light sensitive.<\/p>\n

Deisseroth took the discovery even further, using rats to demonstrate that by introducing the gene for a channelrhodopsin into nerve cells, it was possible to produce electrical signals in them using light.<\/p>\n

Karl Deisseroth at work in his laboratory at Stanford University school of medicine in Palo Alto, California. Photograph: Steve Fisch\/Stanford Medicine\/Reuters<\/p>\n

He and his colleagues later applied the approach to nerve cells in the motor cortex of the brains of mice, allowing them to use light \u2013 delivered by tiny optic fibres passed through their skull \u2013 to trigger movement in the rodent\u2019s whiskers.<\/p>\n

Subsequent work in mice showed the approach could also be used to investigate which networks of nerve cells were involved in the formation of particular memories, including fear.<\/p>\n

While rooted in basic science, the team\u2019s work has already had real-world implications, opening up a field of medicine known as optogenetic therapy.<\/p>\n

In one trial it was used to partially restore the sight of a man<\/a> who went blind as a result of retinitis pigmentosa, a condition that results in damage to light-sensitive cells in the retina.<\/p>\n

In that case, the genetic instructions for making a channelrhodopsin were delivered by means of a harmless virus into retinal ganglion cells in the man\u2019s eyes.<\/p>\n

He was then kitted out with light-stimulating goggles that captured pictures of the world around him and converted them into single-wavelength images that were projected on to his retina using pulses of light.<\/p>\n

Prof Botond Roska, the director of the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel who co-led the study, welcomed the announcement of the Nobel laureates.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is truly wonderful news. I hope this helps to boost all efforts on optogenetic vision restoration to bring back vision to blind patients,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Anna Wedell, a professor at Karolinska Institute and a member of the Nobel committee for physiology or medicine, said the laureates\u2019 work had provided new possibilities to map which cells were responsible for which functions, and which cells communicated with each other, opening up a new understanding of the function of the brain.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe brain is our most complex organ and we have very little understanding of how it works and we have had very few methods to proceed in that understanding,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve had anatomical maps and correlations, but now we have a tool that can provide cause-and-effect relationships so we can get a functional map of the brain, exactly pinpoint which cells do what, which cells are responsible for creating behaviours or even emotions and memories in the brain.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wedell said that by studying animals to understand how a normal, healthy brain worked, it was then possible to explore what happens when thing went wrong \u2013 for example in the case of diseases such as dementia, epilepsy and addiction.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy understanding which cells are active in these diseases in the mouse, we can also understand where to look in the human,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Nobel prize in physiology or medicine 2026 has been awarded to three scientists for their work investigating…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":792783,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-792782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=792782"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792782\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/792783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=792782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=792782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=792782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}