2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine Honors The Pioneers of Optogenics

Photo Credit: © The Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine. Ill. Mattias Karlén

The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awardees are Peter Hegemann, professor at Humboldt University in Germany, Georg Nabel, professor at the University of Würzburg in Germany, and Karl Deisseroth, professor at Stanford University.

Hegemann, Nabel and Deisseroth pioneered optogenetics: an advanced biological technique that combines genetic engineering and light to monitor and control the activity of specific cells in living tissue. Their research involved rats, mice, and mammalian cells.

In the early 2000s Hegemann and Nagel discovered a unique function of the channel-rhodopsin protein found in unicellular green algae: it converts light into an electrical current that activates or inhibits cells. They found that regardless of which cell they put the protein in, those cells became light sensitive.

Deisseroth built on Hegemann and Nagel’s discovery by introducing the gene that encodes the channel-rhosopsin protein into rat nerve cells and triggered a nerve signal. Two years later he was able to make this light-controlled electrical signal work in living mice.

Researchers use optogenetics to activate and inhibit electrical signals in specific neurons in living animals to study brain circuits. Unlike older electrical methods used to study the brain, optogenetics does not damage surrounding tissue and provides millisecond precision on brain signal transmission. Since it is less invasive than other methods of studying the brain it is also helping researchers toward lab animal research refinement and reduction.

Optogenetics holds promise to continue understanding how specific brain cells govern behavior, memory, and emotions, and to explore treatments for neurological disorders. In 2021 researchers used optogenetic therapy to help a patient in France who had been completely blind for nearly 40 years to partially recover his eye sight.