EMMANUEL MIGNOT
Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Stanford University School of Medicine Director, Stanford Center for Sleep Sciences and MedicineCOURTESY OF STANFORD UNIVERSITYIn November 1986, Emmanuel Mignot arrived at Stanford University’s Center for Sleep Sciences and Medicine for a 16-month stint as a research associate. His goal was to find effective drugs to treat narcolepsy; his study subjects belonged to a colony of canines that suffered from the malady. “[When I got there], the dogs were being maintained, but not much was being done with them other than some chemistry studies on known neurotransmitters,” says Mignot, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University and now director of the center. “As a pharmacologist, I wanted to study potential treatments for narcolepsy and understand the molecular biology to improve treatment in humans.”
The first narcoleptic dog, a French poodle named Monique, was brought to Stanford in 1974 by William Dement, the so-called “father of sleep medicine,” who had founded the center in 1970, the first in the world dedicated to the study of sleep. Dement and other researchers there established a full breeding colony in 1977 when dogs with a genetic form of the neurological disorder were discovered—initially, some puppies from a litter of Dobermans and, later, some Labradors. Narcoleptic dogs and humans both exhibit a combination of symptoms: perpetual sleepiness, cataplexy—muscle paralysis attacks triggered by emotions—and abnormal rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. While the condition in humans and dogs is treatable, there is no cure.
To study which narcolepsy drugs increased wakefulness and decreased cataplexy in ...
