The 2026 Brain Prize was awarded to David Ginty and Patrik Ernfors for their pioneering work on the cellular architecture that determines how the nervous system of mice (and by extension most animals) detects and processes stimuli such as touch and pain.
Key messages :
- The 2026 Brain Prize was awarded to David Ginty (Harvard Medical School) and Patrik Ernfors (Karolinska Institute) for discovering the cellular and molecular mechanisms behind how the nervous system detects and processes touch and pain.
- Ginty and Ernfors mapped in mice, primates and humans, how skin sensations – such as pressure, vibration, and pain – are converted into nerve signals, and processed by the brain to produce the perception of touch and pain.
- Ginty's team found that gene mutations linked to autism spectrum disorder can directly alter touch-sensing nerve cells in mice, causing tactile over-sensitivity – a common symptom in people with autism — that could be reduced with targeted drugs.
- Ernfors discovered that pain sensing involves a partnership between nerve cells and glial cells at the skin's surface, and his 2015 study produced the first detailed transcriptional atlas of a type of mouse neuron, which became a standard reference framework for the field.
- The discoveries by Ginty and Ernfors have rewritten textbooks and provided the foundation to solve the question of how we sense the physical world and opened realistic paths to combat pathologies.
Understanding our senses
Sensory neurons in our body help us feel, experience and detect the world around us. In a split second, these cells tell us where we are in a room, what we are holding and touching, and also in how much pain we are in. Before we can even think about it, they provide our brain with feedback information that informs how we respond to the outside world.
Surprisingly, even though scientists have studied touch and pain for over 150 years, for most of the twentieth century we knew very little about the specific cells responsible, or how they connect to the brain and spinal cord. Patrik Ernfors (Karolinska Institute, Sweden) and David Ginty (Harvard Medical School, US) changed that.
Together, Ernfors and Ginty revolutionised the somatosensory field by identifying the cells that transform painful, thermal and mechanical stimulation of the skin into neural signals. They mapped how these signals are transmitted to – and processed by – the spinal cord and how the nervous system ultimately turns them into emotional and behavioural responses like "that hurts" or "that's soft”.
Mapping the world of touch
Based on developmental studies in chicken embryos and transgenic mouse lines, scientists knew that the body contains many different sensory neurons, each suited to a different job. These different cell types develop thanks to specific growth-signalling molecules – called neurotrophins – that help nerve cells grow, survive, and specialise.
David Ginty set out to map this system in detail. Over two decades, his lab generated multiple mouse models and developed a toolkit of genetic mouse lines that allowed researchers to study more than a dozen different touch receptor subtypes – describing their anatomy and structure in detail, how they're wired into in vivo circuits, and what happens when they're switched on or off.
Ginty then used these models to investigate what goes wrong in disease, particularly neurodevelopmental disorders. His team discovered that gene mutations linked to autism spectrum disorder can directly change how touch-sensing nerve cells behave in mice, making them overly sensitive to touch – a trait commonly reported by people with autism. Remarkably, the team found that targeted drugs could normalise this over-sensitivity without sedating the animals, pointing toward possible future treatments.
Decoding pain
Patrik Ernfors’ venture into the sensory system also began with neurotrophins. One of his early breakthroughs was identifying specialised cells that were both necessary and sufficient for sensing mechanical pain. With his team, he found that these "pain neurons" work in close partnership with another type of support cell, called glial cells, right at the surface of the skin – challenging the idea that pain detection is purely a job for nerve cells alone.
Recognising that functional diversity must be underpinned by transcriptional diversity, Ernfors was among the first to use large-scale, single-cell RNA sequencing, a powerful tool that lets scientists read the genetic activity of cells.
In a landmark study in 2015, his team used this approach to create the first detailed “productivity” map of a type of mouse neuron (dorsal root ganglion neurons). This transcriptional atlas has since become a standard reference for researchers worldwide. Ernfors extended this work to primate and human sensory ganglia, enabling cross-species comparisons. He found that while many sensory neurons are shared across species, the cells responsible for sensing pain have evolved differently in primates and humans, in terms of gene expression and receptor repertoires, suggesting that our pain-sensing system may have been "fine-tuned" by evolution in ways unique to humans.
Rewriting the textbook on touch and pain
Together, Ginty and Ernfors have transformed our understanding of touch and pain. They have turned a coarse map of “touch” and “pain” fibres into a high-resolution cellular and circuit-level architecture.
Their combined research has shown that the rich sensations of touch and pain we experience every day rely on an organised assembly of neuronal and glial cells, each with their own characteristic molecular signatures, developmental programs, and specialised roadmaps in the nervous system. This architecture allows the nervous system to decode complex mechanical and thermal stimuli to generate the nuanced perceptions of touch and pain that we experience.
These discoveries of Ernfors and Ginty have rewritten textbook principles of somatosensation and opened real paths toward fixing what goes wrong when that sense malfunctions. Their genetic tools and cell-type atlases are guiding efforts to design new drugs, gene therapies, and targeted interventions, potentially offering relief for chronic pain and other sensory disorders without the side effects of current treatments.
Last edited: 11 August 2026 09:48
