---
title: "Optogenetics Wins a Medicine Nobel With No Approved Treatment After Two Decades"
description: "Human results for the light switch for neurons come only from the eye, and the first therapy awaits an F.D.A. ruling in the first half of 2027"
author: "rews special report"
published: 2026-10-05T17:59:27Z
modified: 2026-10-06T04:46:06Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/the-nobel-prize-for-pointing-blue-light-at-algae-and-then-at-43ac0f
language: en
type: special report
tags: ["nobel", "optogenetics", "neuroscience", "brain", "biology", "science"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Optogenetics Wins a Medicine Nobel With No Approved Treatment After Two Decades

*Human results for the light switch for neurons come only from the eye, and the first therapy awaits an F.D.A. ruling in the first half of 2027*

Special report · By rews special report · October 5, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/the-nobel-prize-for-pointing-blue-light-at-algae-and-then-at-43ac0f

## In brief

- Georg Nagel said he knew of one patient helped by optogenetics and that the medicine prize came too early
- Deisseroth, Hegemann and Nagel won the 2026 medicine Nobel for light-gated ion channels and optogenetics
- AbbVie’s channelrhodopsin eye therapy showed no efficacy in 14 patients, and its development stopped for business reasons
- The F.D.A. accepted Nanoscope’s Mogenry application, based on a 27-patient trial, with a decision expected in the first half of 2027
- MapLight, co-founded by Deisseroth, reported mixed Phase 2 results for two drugs it says came from circuit mapping

Georg Nagel, one of three scientists awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for optogenetics, said within hours of the announcement that he knew of only one patient who had benefited from it and that the medicine prize had come too early.

Dr. Nagel, 73, heard the news “on the terrace, in the sun” in Italy, he said in a telephone interview posted on the Nobel Prize website and reported by [CNN](https://cnn.com/2026/10/05/science/nobel-prize-medicine-karl-deisseroth-peter-hegemann-georg-nagel-intl). For years, he said, he had told friends who follow the October announcements to “Keep cool.”

> There’s only, so far, I know of one patient who profited from optogenetics so ... I thought it’s still too early to get this prize in medicine.
>
> — Georg Nagel, biophysicist at the University of Würzburg and 2026 laureate, [cnn.com](https://cnn.com/2026/10/05/science/nobel-prize-medicine-karl-deisseroth-peter-hegemann-georg-nagel-intl)

The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm split the prize among Dr. Nagel, Peter Hegemann of Humboldt University of Berlin and Karl Deisseroth of Stanford University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, [citing](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2026/press-release/) “their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.” The three share 12 million Swedish kronor, about $1.2 million. Their method puts a gene borrowed from algae into chosen nerve cells so that a pulse of light switches those cells on or off. Since 2005 it has spread to neuroscience labs around the world.

The medical record is about as thin as Dr. Nagel said. No optogenetic treatment is approved anywhere. The only published results in people come from the eye, in patients blinded by retinitis pigmentosa. The therapy furthest along, Nanoscope Therapeutics’ Mogenry, rests on a randomized trial of 27 patients and awaits a Food and Drug Administration decision [expected in the first half of 2027](https://eyewire.news/news/fda-accepts-nanoscopes-bla-for-optogenetic-gene-therapy-mogenry-in-retinitis-pigmentosa). A channelrhodopsin therapy tested by AbbVie showed no benefit. Optical cochlear implants, a pain treatment and an epilepsy implant are still in animal studies or in planning.

The case for the prize rests elsewhere. Two decades of experiments let neuroscientists test cause and effect in the living brain. There is also a slower route to patients, in which circuit maps from mice shape ordinary drugs and electrodes. That route has a mixed record too, and its first drug trials reported results this summer.

## A question about algae

In 1999, Francis Crick, a 1962 Nobel laureate, [wrote](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.1999.0541) that neuroscience needed a way to turn particular types of neurons on and off quickly in an alert animal. “The ideal signal would be light,” he wrote, while granting that the idea “seems rather far-fetched.”

The answer came from pond algae. Dr. Hegemann wanted to know how Chlamydomonas, a single-celled green alga, swims toward light. He found that an electrical impulse followed half a millisecond after light reached its eyespot, according to the Nobel Assembly’s [popular summary](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2026/popular-information/). With Dr. Nagel, an expert in how ions cross membranes, he identified channelrhodopsin in the early 2000s. It is a membrane protein that opens a channel when blue light hits it. Any cell the pair gave it to became sensitive to light. In a frog egg cell, channelrhodopsin-2 opened within 0.2 milliseconds, the committee said. The German work was done at Max Planck institutes in Martinsried and Frankfurt.

Others had tried to make neurons answer to light. Those earlier methods needed several inserted genes, special chemicals or lasers strong enough to damage the cells, John Timmer, the science editor of [Ars Technica](https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/10/controlling-the-brain-with-light-earns-a-physiology-nobel/), wrote in summarizing the committee’s account. Gero Miesenböck, now at Oxford, made neurons fire in response to light in 2002 using a different molecule, [according to the Brain Prize](https://brainprize.org/winners/optogenetics-2013). Channelrhodopsin was a single gene.

Dr. Deisseroth is a psychiatrist who still sees patients. He put the gene into cultured rat neurons, and his lab reported in Nature Neuroscience in 2005 that millisecond pulses of blue light made them fire. The lab worked with Dr. Nagel and Ernst Bamberg of the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics, [R&D World reported](https://www.rdworldonline.com/optogenetics-just-won-the-nobel-prize-its-first-therapy-is-already-under-fda-review/). Two years later the switch worked in the brains of living mice, according to the committee.

The 2005 paper’s first author was Ed Boyden, now at M.I.T. STAT [described](https://www.statnews.com/2026/10/05/nobel-prize-medicine-2026-winner-deisseroth-hegemann-nagel/) him as a Ph.D. student in Dr. Deisseroth’s lab at the time and said he did not respond to requests for comment. Antonio Regalado of MIT Technology Review, posting on X after the announcement, gave a different version, saying that in Dr. Boyden’s view he was a student in another lab and Dr. Deisseroth a postdoctoral researcher without a lab of his own.

> Nobel Prize for optogenetics shared by 3 (Deisseroth, Nagel and Hegemann).
>
> There will ‘oh-so-close’ feelings at MIT by the first author of Deisseroth’s paper, the prominent neuroscientist Edward Boyden.
>
> /more
>
> — **Antonio Regalado** @antonioregalado on X · [October 5, 2026](https://x.com/antonioregalado/status/2107077388274188670)

Others were close behind. Zhuo-Hua Pan of Wayne State University put channelrhodopsin into retinal ganglion cells in 2004, but his paper, submitted late that year, did not appear until 2006, STAT reported. In 2013 the Brain Prize split 1 million euros among six people: Dr. Bamberg, Dr. Boyden, Dr. Deisseroth, Dr. Hegemann, Dr. Miesenböck and Dr. Nagel. The [2021 Lasker Award](https://laskerfoundation.org/winners/2021-winners/) for basic research went to Dr. Hegemann, Dr. Deisseroth and Dieter Oesterhelt, and not to Dr. Nagel. The Nobel is limited to three people, and the committee’s chair would not say why it chose these three, STAT reported.

## What the switch showed

Abdel El Manira, a member of the Nobel Committee, put the result plainly at Monday’s news conference, [Physics World](https://physicsworld.com/a/inventors-of-optogenetics-win-nobel-prize-in-physiology-or-medicine/) reported.

> For the first time, causal links between specific brain circuits and behaviour had been achieved.
>
> — Abdel El Manira, Nobel Committee member, Karolinska Institutet, [physicsworld.com](https://physicsworld.com/a/inventors-of-optogenetics-win-nobel-prize-in-physiology-or-medicine/)

One early result changed the explanation for a treatment already in use. Deep brain stimulation, in which an implanted electrode delivers current, eases Parkinson’s symptoms, but the tissue around the electrode holds many kinds of cells. In a 2009 [paper in Science](https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1167093), Dr. Deisseroth’s group drove or silenced each element in turn in parkinsonian rodents. The benefit came from stimulating nerve fibers arriving in the subthalamic nucleus, not from acting on the nucleus’s own neurons, as had commonly been thought.

Christian Lüscher and colleagues went a step further in 2015. Optogenetic protocols had already reversed cocaine-driven changes at identified synapses in mice. The team then found that low-frequency deep brain stimulation, paired with a drug that blocks dopamine D1 receptors, could mimic the optogenetic fix and normalize the animals’ drug-adapted behavior, according to [the paper in Science](https://ww2.uthscsa.edu/artt/AddictionJC/CreedPascoliLuscher15.pdf).

The committee’s list of circuits mapped this way takes in pain, social behavior, thirst, eating, reward and attention. Its summary points to a 2012 study involving Susumu Tonegawa’s lab, in which reactivating mouse hippocampal neurons tagged during a frightening experience was enough to bring back the fear response. Ars noted another, in which a brain area needed for maternal care turned out to hold separate cells for jobs such as searching for pups.

Some of the work has reached people indirectly. In a 2020 [Nature paper](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2731-9), Dr. Deisseroth’s lab reported that ketamine set off a slow rhythm, one to three cycles a second, in a layer of the retrosplenial cortex of mice, and that driving those neurons with light at that pace reproduced dissociation-like behavior. A patient with epilepsy who had electrodes in the brain showed a similar rhythm before dissociative episodes, and electrical stimulation of that spot produced the experience. The human evidence came from one person.

“Conventional electrical stimulation can stimulate many surrounding nerve cells together, but optogenetics can selectively control specific types of nerve cells,” Kim Jun-ki, a professor at Asan Medical Center in Seoul, told [the Chosun Ilbo](https://chosun.com/national/welfare-medical/2026/10/05/WGQCRDGNUFH4VBGIQ3PT2ZFJMI/) in Korean.

## The case against

On Hacker News, a reader who remembered the field’s boom years questioned how much it had delivered.

> I could never decide if it was actually useful for either basic science or medicine or a toy. Looking at the basic science results I could not decide if they were bringing in really novel understanding or basically repeating a lot of the old electrical stimulation results.
>
> — here\_to\_learn on [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49964597)

The published critiques are narrower. A 2015 [study in Nature](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature16442) from Bence Ölveczky’s lab at Harvard found that briefly switching off a brain region badly impaired learned skills in rats and the song of zebra finches, although the same skills recovered on their own after the region was permanently destroyed. Silencing one area also disrupted another downstream. A Current Biology commentary concluded that acute manipulations of this kind can lead to overestimates of what a circuit does.

Christophe Bernard, the editor in chief of eNeuro, made a broader point in a [2020 editorial](https://www.eneuro.org/content/7/2/ENEURO.0091-20.2020). The optical fiber passes through other brain regions on its way to the target and can damage tissue. Many protocols house animals alone to protect the hardware, which stresses a social species. He compared the moment to the early enthusiasm for gene knockouts.

> The observation of Y is indeed the result of activation of X but with many other possible steps and pathways in-between.
>
> — Christophe Bernard, editor in chief of eNeuro, [eneuro.org](https://www.eneuro.org/content/7/2/ENEURO.0091-20.2020)

Those objections apply most to one kind of claim, that a given population of cells “controls” a memory or a mood. They do not make the tool a toy. The Parkinson’s study did not just repeat electrical stimulation results. It accounted for them, and showed that the accepted explanation was wrong. The Current Biology commentary praised Dr. Ölveczky’s team for pairing brief switch-offs with old-fashioned lesions, a cross-check the critics want added to optogenetic experiments, not a substitute for them.

A reader who said he had collaborated with Dr. Deisseroth during his doctoral work answered the “toy” comment in the same thread.

> It’s gives enormous power to scientists to perform more causal manipulations and test ideas more concretely than observation or genetic manipulations alone. I’m not sure why it would be considered a toy, though the utility depends on what you do with it.
>
> — etrautmann on [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49967613)

## The one patient

The case the committee described matches one reported in [Nature Medicine](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01351-4) on May 24, 2021, by a team led by José-Alain Sahel of the University of Pittsburgh and the Institut de la Vision, with Botond Roska of the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel. A 58-year-old man, diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa 40 years earlier, received an injection in his worse eye of a virus carrying ChrimsonR, a light-sensitive channel, aimed at the retina’s ganglion cells. He wore goggles that turned changes in the scene into pulses of light projected onto the retina.

About seven months after the injection he began to notice changes. Using only the treated eye and wearing the goggles, he perceived objects in 18 of 28 trials, or 64 percent, and touched them in 16 of 28, or 57 percent. Without the goggles he could not see them.

GenSight Biologics, which is developing the treatment as GS030, still listed it in Phase 1/2 in its [first-half 2026 report](https://www.biospace.com/press-releases/gensight-biologics-reports-interim-financial-results-for-the-first-half-of-2026-and-provides-business-updates). The company has said that because cells carrying optogenetic proteins are less sensitive than the eye’s own photoreceptors, vision in ordinary daylight is unlikely without further intervention.

An earlier eye program did worse. RetroSense Therapeutics’ RST-001 carried channelrhodopsin-2 itself, and Allergan bought the company’s assets for [$60 million up front](https://drug-dev.com/allergan-acquires-gene-therapy-company/). After Allergan became part of AbbVie, “the development of AGN-151597 was discontinued for business reasons,” according to results published July 13 in [Ophthalmology Science](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13475202/). The 14 treated patients were followed for five years without serious safety problems. The authors, led by Bill Bunnell of AbbVie, wrote: “There was no evidence of AGN-151597 efficacy in slowing vision decline in patients with advanced retinitis pigmentosa.”

## A therapy under review

Nanoscope said on Sept. 9 that the F.D.A. had accepted its application for Mogenry, the brand name for sonpiretigene isteparvovec, formerly MCO-010, [Optometry Times reported](https://www.optometrytimes.com/view/fda-accepts-nanoscope-s-bla-mco-010-retinitis-pigmentosa). One injection into the eye delivers a synthetic opsin gene to the retina’s surviving bipolar cells. The company says patients won’t need goggles, and that the therapy works whichever of the disease’s many mutations a patient carries. One of its light-sensitive components is CatCh, an engineered channelrhodopsin-2 from Dr. Bamberg’s group, according to R&D World.

The application rests mainly on RESTORE, a randomized, double-masked trial in which 18 patients received the therapy and nine a sham injection. At 52 weeks, visual acuity in the high-dose group had improved by about three lines on an eye chart more than in the sham group. The company reported no serious treatment-related adverse events over two years. About 44 percent of patients had inflammation in the front of the eye, and about 39 percent had raised eye pressure.

An independent review last year was more guarded. The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review found that seven of 18 treated patients reached a clinically meaningful gain in acuity, against one of nine on sham, and that only one treated patient improved on all three measures. The results had not been peer-reviewed at the time, and the institute described the response as “widely variable with an uncertain durability,” according to its [published summary](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12288717). With a placeholder price of $437,500 per injection, it estimated $646,000 per quality-adjusted life year gained, and put a cost-effective price at about $67,400 to $101,300. Ten of the 12 members of its advisory panel still judged the evidence adequate to show a net health benefit.

Two smaller programs follow. Ray Therapeutics of Berkeley, Calif., received the F.D.A.’s regenerative medicine advanced therapy designation for RTx-015 on [April 1](https://raytherapeutics.com/ray-therapeutics-receives-fda-regenerative-medicine-advanced-therapy-rmat-designation-for-rtx-015-in-retinitis-pigmentosa/) without publishing trial figures. Restore Vision, a Keio University spinoff, [reported on May 1](https://www.biopharminternational.com/view/restore-vision-reports-early-clinical-signal-for-gpcr-based-optogenetic-therapy-in-retinitis-pigmentosa) that all three patients in its high-dose group, who had no light perception at the start, could perceive light or better within a month. Six patients had been treated.

By the standard of peer-reviewed reports of restored function, Dr. Nagel’s count of one is close to right. Company data show several RESTORE patients gaining acuity, and Per Svenningsson, the committee chair, said “there are several clinical trials ongoing with this approach.” None of it yet adds up to an approved treatment.

## Ears, pain and epilepsy

Tobias Moser of University Medical Center Göttingen has spent years on a cochlear implant that would use light instead of electrical current. Current spreads in the inner ear and limits how many separate pitch channels an implant can drive. His institute’s \[research timeline\](http://www.auditory-neuroscience.uni-goettingen.de/hearing\_the\_light\_EN.html) listed a Phase 1/2 trial for 2026. In a [March 4 article](https://www.entandaudiologynews.com/features/ent-features/post/optical-cochlear-implants-recent-progress-toward-light-based-hearing-restoration), Dr. Moser, a co-founder of the start-up OptoGenTech, wrote that advances in opsins, hardware and gene delivery “now converge toward first-in-human applications,” with challenges left in device integration and regulation. It was not clear whether a trial had begun.

On Hacker News, a reader who said they had raised the idea with one of the big implant makers reported a cool reception.

> Last time I spoke with one of the large CI vendors they were rather sceptical
>
> — plastic-enjoyer on [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49963831)

Modulight Biotherapeutics, a Boston start-up, raised [$12.2 million](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/modulight-biotherapeutics-announces-12-million-seed-funding-for-novel-optogenetic-therapy-to-treat-neurological-disorders-302612850.html) in November 2025 to take an inhibitory opsin called eOPN3 into trigeminal pain, injecting the gene into the nerve and quieting it with light. Early human trials were expected within two years, [a January report said](https://www.lightnowblog.com/2026/01/optogenetics-moving-from-lab-to-therapeutic-treatments). CANDO, a British project, set out to test an optogenetic implant in people with focal epilepsy. Imperial College London lists it as a [completed project](https://www.imperial.ac.uk/a-z-research/next-generation-neural-interfaces/research/projects/cando/) that ran from 2014 to 2021, and no human trial has been reported. A 2024 study led by the University of California, San Francisco, [controlled seizure-like activity with light](https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2024/11/428896/how-optogenetics-can-put-brakes-epilepsy-seizures) in brain tissue removed from patients during surgery, not in living patients.

## The indirect route

Dr. Deisseroth has argued that the bigger payoff lies somewhere else. His [website](https://deisseroth.com/) describes MapLight Therapeutics, which he co-founded in 2018, as “indirect optogenetics,” new medicine development “grounded in causal neural circuit discovery.” He made the case on Monday to [WBUR’s *Here & Now*](https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2026/10/05/karl-deisseroth-nobel-prize).

> Once you understand the cells that matter, you can design any kind of treatment.
>
> — Karl Deisseroth, Stanford psychiatrist and bioengineer, 2026 laureate, [wbur.org](https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2026/10/05/karl-deisseroth-nobel-prize)

MapLight’s drugs are ordinary pills. On July 27 it [reported](https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/07/27/3333379/0/en/maplight-therapeutics-announces-positive-topline-results-from-phase-2-zephyr-trial-of-ml-007c-ma-in-schizophrenia.html) that ML-007C-MA, a muscarinic agonist for schizophrenia, met its main goal at the twice-daily dose in a 307-patient Phase 2 trial, improving a standard symptom scale by 4.5 points more than placebo at five weeks. The once-daily dose missed. [Fierce Biotech](https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/maplight-shares-sink-mixed-ph-2-schizophrenia-readout) reported that the shares sank on the mixed result. In June the company said ML-004 had [missed its primary endpoint](https://www.biospace.com/press-releases/maplight-announces-topline-results-from-phase-2-iris-study-for-ml-004-in-autism-spectrum-disorder) in a 161-person autism trial, with a signal only in adolescents with more severe irritability. The July release does not mention optogenetics.

On Hacker News, a reader who said Dr. Deisseroth had been his postdoctoral adviser pointed to the company as the clinical bet.

> The company MapLight he started is working to make these treatments a reality via ongoing clinical trials
>
> — djoshea on [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49963389)

From the outside there is no way to test whether a circuit map in mice picked a better drug target than conventional pharmacology would have, and two mixed Phase 2 trials don’t settle the question either way. The cocaine and Parkinson’s studies show how the indirect route is meant to work, with optogenetic findings changing how electrodes are set. Those studies, and a [2021 follow-up](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi7852) that found circuit-inspired stimulation outlasted conventional stimulation in Parkinson’s models, were done in rodents.

## Too early, or overdue

Michael Häusser, a neuroscientist at Hong Kong University and University College London, had the opposite complaint. “What took them so long?” he told Ewen Callaway of [Nature](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-03094-z). He suggested the committee had waited because direct uses in human disease, such as the vision trials and start-ups building optically stimulated brain-machine interfaces, emerged only in the past few years.

The committee did not oversell. Thomas Perlmann, its secretary-general, called the vision work an excellent example but described optogenetics as “primarily a tool for basic research,” R&D World reported. Markus Söder, the minister-president of Bavaria, went further. “Professor Nagel’s research is helping people to live longer and better lives,” he said in a [statement released by the University of Würzburg](https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/news/nobelprize-georg-nagel/). The trial record does not yet support that.

Dr. Timmer of Ars Technica argued that the real test of a tool is what other people do with it.

> While the three people being honored made key contributions to its development, they have only made a relatively small contribution to its use.
>
> — John Timmer, science editor, Ars Technica, [arstechnica.com](https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/10/controlling-the-brain-with-light-earns-a-physiology-nobel/)

The prize is for physiology or medicine, and the citation names discoveries, not cures. Judged on what the work revealed, the field was ready years ago, as the Brain Prize in 2013 and the Lasker in 2021 had already concluded. Judged by patients helped, the measure Dr. Nagel used, the record supports him.

The Nobel Prize posted the full call with Dr. Nagel the same day.

[![First reactions | Georg Nagel, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine | telephone interview](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/E_tL0QzwOZU/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_tL0QzwOZU)

Georg Nagel’s telephone interview on hearing of the 2026 prize, published by the Nobel Prize. Video: Nobel Prize · YouTube

The laureates receive their medals in Stockholm on Dec. 10. The F.D.A. is due to rule on Mogenry in the first half of 2027, and Nanoscope has said it expects to be ready to sell it in that window. MapLight expects results from its trial in Alzheimer’s disease psychosis in the second half of 2027.

## Join the discussion

- [2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine: Deisseroth, Hegemann, Nagel](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49962572) — Hacker News · 131 points · 47 comments
- [Karl Deisseroth, professor of bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, shares the news of his Nobel Prize with his family.](https://www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/comments/1wyhldz/karl_deisseroth_professor_of_bioengineering_and/) — r/MadeMeSmile
- [Congratulations to the new Nobel Prize laureates in Physiology or Medicine!](https://www.reddit.com/r/labrats/comments/1wy4zsf/congratulations_to_the_new_nobel_prize_laureates/) — r/labrats

## See also

- [Scientific background 2026: Optogenetics, discovery of a neuronal switch](https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2026/10/advanced-medicineprize2026.pdf) — nobelprize.org · The Nobel Committee's technical account of the discoveries and their uses
- [Roadmap for direct and indirect translation of optogenetics into discoveries and therapies for humans](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-02097-9) — nature.com · Lüscher, Deisseroth and others on the two routes from lab to clinic
- [From microbial membrane proteins to the mysteries of emotion](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10327439/) — pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov · Deisseroth's own essay in Cell on the work and on psychiatry
- [Caveats and Limitations of Optogenetics (Society for Neuroscience training module)](https://neuronline.sfn.org/training/module-8-caveats-and-limitations-of-optogenetics) — neuronline.sfn.org · Researchers on the artifacts and interpretation problems in optogenetic experiments
- [ICER draft evidence report on sonpiretigene isteparvovec](https://icer.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/ICER_RP_Draft-Report_For-Publication_020625.pdf) — icer.org · Full independent review of the trial data and pricing behind Mogenry
- [RESTORE trial record on ClinicalTrials.gov](https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT04945772) — clinicaltrials.gov · Design and endpoints of the trial behind the first optogenetic drug application
- [Can adding light sensors to nerve cells switch off pain, epilepsy, and other disorders?](https://www.science.org/content/article/can-adding-light-sensors-nerve-cells-switch-pain-epilepsy-and-other-disorders) — science.org · Science on the push beyond the eye and the safety questions it faces
- [Optogenetic vision restoration: translational barriers and emerging therapeutic strategies](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41434-026-00640-2) — nature.com · A 2026 review in Gene Therapy of why vision trials have moved slowly

## Sources

- [Nobel medicine prize honours US and German scientists for optogenetics work](https://aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/5/nobel-medicine-prize-honours-us-and-german-scientists-for-optogenetics-work) — aljazeera.com
- [Nobel medicine prize goes to 3 scientists for research into brain activity](https://bostonglobe.com/2026/10/05/world/nobel-prize-physiology-medicine/) — bostonglobe.com
- [광유전학 개척한 3인, 노벨 생리의학상 수상](https://chosun.com/national/welfare-medical/2026/10/05/WGQCRDGNUFH4VBGIQ3PT2ZFJMI/) — chosun.com
- [Nobel Prize in medicine awarded to trio for technique decoding the brain](https://cnn.com/2026/10/05/science/nobel-prize-medicine-karl-deisseroth-peter-hegemann-georg-nagel-intl) — cnn.com
- [Nobel medicine prize goes to 3 scientists for research into brain activity](https://npr.org/2026/10/05/g-s1-146400/nobel-medicine-prize) — npr.org
- [Controlling the brain with light earns a physiology Nobel](https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/10/controlling-the-brain-with-light-earns-a-physiology-nobel/) — Ars Technica
- [Nobel Prize in medicine goes to the light switch for brain cells](https://thenextweb.com/news/nobel-prize-medicine-2026-optogenetics) — thenextweb.com