It’s Nobel Prize time – Who will win this year?
It is once again time to honor extraordinary scientific discoveries. Will it be the GLP-1 pioneers – among them Denmark’s Jens Juul Holst – optical coherence tomography, the wakefulness peptide orexin, or precision gene editing that is honored this year? Or will it be something completely different?
October 2, 2026
This will be our 19th Nobel Prize coverage! We have covered the announcements, written about the discoveries and interviewed the Nobel Laureates since 2008 – and this year will be no exception.
On Monday, October 5, the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet announces the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, followed by the prize in Physics on Tuesday and Chemistry on Wednesday. And as always, the speculation is in full swing.
A Danish GLP-1 pioneer on the shortlist
One of the most closely watched indicators is Clarivate’s annual list of Citation Laureates – and this year it has a Nordic flavor. Jens Juul Holst, Professor of Medical Physiology at the University of Copenhagen and Senior Group Leader at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research, is named together with Daniel J. Drucker (University of Toronto) and Svetlana Mojsov (Rockefeller University) “for identification and characterization of Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 (GLP-1) and studies of its biological activity”.
Holst is the only Nordic-based researcher among this year’s 22 Citation Laureates. Since the list started, 89 Citation Laureates have gone on to receive a Nobel Prize, although Clarivate stresses that it does not aim to predict the winners of a specific year.
GLP-1 was among the bets last year too, and Danish Lotte Bjerre Knudsen, who championed GLP-1-based drugs during her years at Novo, is once again tipped this year, in The Scientist’s survey of reader predictions. She shared the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences with Holst, Drucker, Mojsov and Joel Habener.
If GLP-1 takes the prize this year, you can already read our exclusive interview with Jens Juul Holst.
More bets in Medicine
Clarivate’s other medicine picks are James G. Fujimoto, David Huang and Eric A. Swanson for developing optical coherence tomography (OCT), today a standard imaging method in ophthalmology, and Timothy A. Springer for identifying key adhesion receptors in the immune system.
Those who bet on Lasker laureates may look to Emmanuel Mignot (Stanford) and Masashi Yanagisawa (University of Tsukuba), who received the 2026 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award last month for identifying orexin, the brain peptide that keeps us awake, and showing that its absence causes narcolepsy. And last year’s Lasker laureates – Dirk Görlich and Steven L. McKnight for low-complexity protein domains, and the trio behind the triple-drug treatment for cystic fibrosis – are still waiting for the call from Stockholm.
Chemistry and Physics: from gene editing to screens
In Chemistry, Clarivate names David R. Liu (Harvard and the Broad Institute) for base editing and prime editing, Harry B. Gray and Jay R. Winkler (Caltech) for long-range electron transfer in proteins, and David L. Allara, Ralph G. Nuzzo and Jacob Sagiv for self-assembled monolayers. Others point to Pieter Cullis and the lipid nanoparticles that made mRNA vaccines possible, or to next-generation DNA sequencing.
Some observers also note that the Chemistry prize tends to alternate between “pure” chemistry and the life sciences – and after last year’s prize for metal-organic frameworks, 2026 may lean towards biology.
In Physics, the Citation Laureates include pioneers of high-efficiency OLED displays, room-temperature multiferroic materials and the quantum anomalous Hall effect.
Or something completely different?
The Nobel committees have surprised the forecasters many times before. CAR-T cell therapy for cancer is also among this year’s tips, while the gut microbiome and the mapping of the human genome have come up in the speculation in recent years. The first answer comes on Monday, October 5, when the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is announced at 11:30 CEST at the earliest.
Did you miss last year’s Nobel coverage?
Don’t worry, here are for example our interviews with the 2025 Medicine laureates Shimon Sakaguchi, Mary E. Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell.
In our interview “Discovery can change the world”, Chemistry laureate Omar Yaghi talks about the beauty of molecules and 35 years of research on metal-organic frameworks.
And in our insight article A delicate balance between defense and self-harm, we explain the discoveries behind the 2025 Medicine prize – how regulatory T cells keep the immune system in check, and why that matters for autoimmune diseases and cancer.
Want to learn more about how last year’s prizes connect to life science? Read about how metal-organic frameworks are opening new doors in the life science industry, and how the Nobel discoveries in Physics are speeding up life sciences.
NLS’s Nobel Prize archive
Browse our archive to learn more about previous laureates, Nordic laureates, and groundbreaking discoveries!
Published: October 2, 2026
