What would you give to only need 2.5 hours of sleep a night?
Well if you answered "a 17% chance of death", you're in luck!
It turns out that nobody actually knew why you get tired until extraordinarily recently. The going theory was that something builds up in the brain all day and sleep washes it out. Elegant, but slightly undermined by nobody being able to say what the something was.
So a team at Basel stopped hunting for a substance and started looking for a culprit. They mapped mouse brains and two populations of neurons kept turning up, firing harder the longer it stayed awake and falling silent the moment it slept.
Switch them on and a well rested mouse passes out like a teenager post Glastonbury, but switch them off and it instantly stops needing sleep (like a teenager at Glastonbury…) Deep sleep dropped by around 70% and the mice were still alert, forming memories and remarkably unbothered. It seems then that tiredness is less a requirement, more a decision, and evidently optional.
Now comes the Faustian part. Roughly one in six of the mice died, and although the paper doesn't explain why, it's a relatively safe assumption that it has something to do with all the drugs.
🧐 What's in it for me? A quarter of a century. That's roughly how much of your life you'll spend unconscious and this is the first decent evidence the figure is negotiable. But before you start planning the extra decades, remember that all of the above happened to mice, a sixth of whom are no longer available for comment.
💵 Out of the Lab: Three weeks ago the FDA approved the first drug that works on the brain's wakefulness switch, opening a market analysts size in the billions. Everyone below is pressing that accelerator. This paper found the brake, and nobody yet owns it.
Takeda got there first with Orzeyful, approved on 5 August for narcolepsy, and now has an entire drug class of its own to defend.
Eli Lilly bought its way in this March, paying $6.3bn for Centessa and its orexin portfolio, which is a fairly firm view on where this ends up.
Alkermes is the closest challenger, with a rival pill in late-stage trials and a readout due before the year is out.
Orexia Therapeutics, private and venture-backed, is the small money in a race that has become expensive with unusual speed.
Until next time.
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