How Breakthroughs in Neuroscience Take Shape: Insights From 16 Years of The Brain Prize

The Brain Prize, established by the Danish Lundbeck Foundation in 2011, is widely regarded as the world’s largest prize for brain research. Since then, 51 scientists from 11 countries received the accolade, with the the 2026 laureates announced on March 5 and honored in Copenhagen on May 20, 2026. Unlike broader awards such as the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and the Kavli Prize, The Brain Prize offers a continuous, neuroscience-specific record of major advances.

In a review published in the Journal of Brain and Spine, Professor Limin Rong's team at The Third Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University uses this record to examine how modern neuroscience develops. 

The authors note that the field advances through five interacting modes: tool-enabled causal access, multiscale mechanistic explanation, computational formalization, disease-oriented translation, and collective discovery, along three connected trajectories: foundational technologies and theoretical frameworks; multiscale mechanisms linking molecules, synapses, circuits, behavior, and cognition; and disease-oriented research.

These trajectories are exemplified by foundational achievements such as optogenetics (2013) and two-photon microscopy (2015), mechanistic advances such as long-term potentiation (2016) and neuronal transcription and translation (2023), and disease-oriented work on Alzheimer’s disease (2018), migraine (2021), and cancer neuroscience (2025).

The 2026 prize honored Patrik Ernfors and David D. Ginty for defining the cellular and circuit architectures underlying touch and pain.

Beyond individual laureates, the review examines collective discovery, co-builders beyond named prize winners, interdisciplinary migration, and institutional ecosystems. Its core message is that major advances in neuroscience are assembled through sustained interactions among tools that make the nervous system accessible, theories that make neural activity interpretable, mechanisms that connect levels of organization, and clinical contexts that make discoveries consequential.

Contact the author:

Limin Rong, Department of Spine Surgery, The Third Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China, ronglm@mail.sysu.edu.cn

Funder:

This work was supported by the Youth Student Basic Research Project for Doctoral Students, National Natural Science Foundation of China (824B2078).

Conflict of interest:

Limin Rong is the editor-in-chief of Journal of Brain and Spine and was not involved in the editorial review or the decision to publish this article. The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

See the article:

He JL, Lu YB, Wang ZM, Tang CY, Liu B, Rong LM. Who wins The Brain Prize? Mapping modern neuroscience. Journal of Brain and Spine, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbs.2026.09.001.