Professor Masashi Yanagisawa and Visiting Professor Hiromasa Funato Won Baelz Prize

The First Prize of the Baelz Prize was awarded to Professor Masashi Yanagisawa and Visiting Professor Hiromasa Funato of the International Institute for Integrative Sleep Medicine (IIIS) in recognition of their contribution to solve the mechanism of sleep/wakefulness and sleep disorder.

Their research team identified two genes that affect sleep and wakefulness by using an electroencephalogram/electromyogram-based screen of randomly mutagenized mice. Their research article was published in Nature in 2016.

Comment from Prize Winners:
We are very honored to receive the long-established Prize. However, our research has just begun, and the finding is just a starting point. We would like to make further efforts to elucidate the mechanism of sleep-wake regulation, and to be a beacon of hope for people suffering from sleep problems.

At the prize conferring ceremony (Photo: Katsumi Yanagiya)

* Baelz Prize
The Baelz Prize is a medical award established by Boehringer Ingelheim in 1964 to respect the historical relationship and to promote collaboration between Japan and Germany in the field of medicine. The prize is awarded based on papers that are submitted each year on a given theme. The theme for this year's Baelz Prize was "sleep mechanism and its disorders."

For details, please visit the Boehringer Ingelheim website
https://www.boehringer-ingelheim.jp/press-release/20171130_01