The Nobel Assembly awarded the 2026 medicine prize to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for discoveries on light-gated ion channels that made optogenetics possible.
The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet said on 5 October 2026 that it had awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.
Deisseroth is affiliated with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Stanford University. Hegemann is at Humboldt University of Berlin and Nagel at the University of Würzburg. The Assembly said the prize amount is 12 million Swedish kronor, to be shared equally.
The official citation traces the work to channelrhodopsin, a light-sensitive protein found in a single-celled alga. Hegemann and Nagel identified the protein as a light-gated ion channel; Deisseroth later turned it into a tool for controlling nerve cells with light in living animals.
Reuters reported from Stockholm that Thomas Perlmann, secretary-general of the Nobel Assembly, said the method can switch individual nerve cells on or off in a living brain. Physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics prizes are due later in the week, with the peace prize scheduled for Friday.
The award is the first of the 2026 Nobel announcements and centres on a laboratory technique now widely used in neuroscience rather than on a single new clinical treatment.