The prestigious Nobel Prizes return next week, bringing with them the annual anticipation over which scientists and discoveries will receive the field’s highest honors. The 2026 laureates will be announced from October 5 to 12. To get a sense of who might be in the running, we asked The Scientist’s readers to share their top predictions for this year’s prizes in Physiology or Medicine, Physics, and Chemistry.
Ubagaramary Dhanasekaran, Chemist, Adhiymaan College of Engineering
My prediction for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is Emmanuel Mignot and Masashi Yanagisawa for their discovery of orexin and its central role in sleep and wake regulation. They have just received the 2026 Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, which is a strong Nobel signal.
Note: Stanford University School of Medicine sleep researcher Emmanuel Mignot and University of Tsukuba molecular geneticist Masashi Yanagisawa also jointly received the 2023 Breakthrough Prize in Life Science for their work on the genetic cause of narcolepsy.
Tiago Góss dos Santos, Tumor Biologist, A.C.Camargo Cancer Center
I predict that Lotte Bjerre Knudsen and John Eng will receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Note: John Eng is an endocrinologist who studied a peptide hormone, like glucagon-like peptide (GLP-1), in the saliva of the venomous Gila monster, which helped pave the way for widely used type 2 diabetes medicines.
Lotte Bjerre Knudsen is a pharmaceutical scientist who, during her time at Novo Nordisk, championed the potential of GLP-1 for diabetes and weight management. She was a recipient of the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.
Karthik Mallilankaraman, Cell Biologist, University of Arizona
I predict that Carl June will receive the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
Note: Carl June is an immunologist and oncologist at the University of Pennsylvania and is known for the development of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy for cancer.
Neharika Saxena, Veterinary Public Health Scientist, Rajasthan University of Veterinary and Animal Sciences
Hari Mohan Saxena from Guru Angad Dev Veterinary and Animal Sciences University should win the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for developing bacteriophage lysate-based immunotherapy of bovine Brucellosis (the second most important zoonotic disease) and a noninvasive monitoring and assessment of efficacy of antimicrobials using pathogen RNA as a biomarker. This could be a game changer in development of new antimicrobials to fight antibiotic resistant infections.
Arijit Ghosh, Consultant, Fitness Fortitude
My prediction for the Nobel Prize in Physics is: John Pendry, a condensed matter physicist at Imperial College London, for his work on metamaterials and the science of invisibility cloaks, has been a perennial candidate. Another possibility is foundational work behind modern optics or quantum sensing.
Then, my prediction for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry is biochemist Pieter Cullis and his team at the University of British Columbia for lipid nanoparticle delivery technology, which made mRNA vaccines possible.
Luís Ferreira Moita, Immunologist, University of Lisbon
Here are my top predictions/bets for Physiology or Medicine in 2026:
1. James Fujimoto, David Huang, and Eric Swanson for the development of optical coherence tomography.
2. Svetlana Mojsov, Jens Juul Holst, and Daniel Drucker for: "the discovery and development of GLP-1-based drugs that have revolutionized the treatment of obesity".
3. Max Cooper and Jacques Miller for their discovery of the two distinct classes of lymphocytes, B and T cells.
4. David Liu for his pioneering work in gene editing.
Note: Electrical engineer James Fujimoto (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), ophthalmologist and biomedical engineer David Huang (Oregon Health & Science University), and electrical engineer Eric Swanson (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) received the 2023 Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award.
Daniel Drucker, an endocrinologist at the University of Toronto, Jens Juul Holst, a physiologist at the University of Copenhagen, and Svetlana Mojsov, a chemist at The Rockefeller University received the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.
Immunologist Max Cooper at Emory University School of Medicine and emeritus professor Jacques Miller at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research received the 2019 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award.
Biochemist David Liu at Harvard University received the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.
Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
