Dr. Matt Walker

And it stands for, it's D-O-R-A, small s, and it's,

and it stands for Juulorexin Receptor Antagonists.

Oh my goodness, mouthful.

That just sounds like word salad to anyone who's not a neuroscientist.

Orexin, which is part of that...

set of words, is a chemical in the brain.

And orexin became prominent with the study of narcolepsy.

And what we, we as the Royal We, people like Emmanuel Mignot and others at Stanford, what they discovered was that narcoleptic patients have a profound deficit in this

this chemical, orexin, and in the receptors, also called hypocretin.

And it has a function both, it turns out, for wakefulness and a function for feeding and eating-related behaviors.

Hypocretin was probably more related to it when it was, because it was discovered right around the same time.

So early 2000s.

Yes, exactly.

Beautiful.

Two different groups named it differently.

But

Narcolepsy, as some people may know, it's a condition to sleep disorder.

And one of the symptoms is called excessive daytime sleepiness, where you have inappropriate invasions of sleep during the day when you want to be awake.

Why?

Well, it turns out that this chemical orexin acts like a finger on the light switch of all of the apparatus in your brain that switches on to force you awake.