This year’s Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award has been awarded to the researchers who discovered the appetite-regulating hormone leptin.

Douglas Coleman, a senior staff scientist emeritus at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor Maine, and Jeffrey Friedman of Rockefeller University in New York are among the latest winners of the Lasker awards, often called “American Nobel Prizes”.

Since the first Lasker was given out in 1945, 79 Lasker awardees have also won the Swedish Nobel. Coincidentally, Coleman and Friedman also made the list of likely Nobel winners released today by Thomson Reuters. (And they are no strangers to ersatz Nobels: the dynamic duo also won the 2009 Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine, an award administered by the Shaw Prize Foundation of Hong Kong and apparently sometimes referred to as “the Nobel of the East”.) Lasker awardees receive fame, fortune (to the tune of $250,000), and a statuette of a headless goddess (the Winged Victory of Samothrace, shown at right).

In the 1960s, Coleman’s genetic studies with obese and diabetic mice led him to hypothesize the existence of a hormone that reigns in appetite. His fat mice, Coleman reasoned, may simply not have enough of this hormone. In 1994, Friedman and his colleagues identified the gene responsible for making the hormone, now called leptin. At the time it was hoped that giving leptin injections to overweight people could cure obesity. This turned out to be true for those with with a leptin deficiency, but not so in obese people who already had normal leptin levels.

Other Lasker winners this year include Napoleone Ferrara, of the South San Francisco-based biotech firm Genentech, who won the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for discovering the VEGF protein, which regulates the formation of blood vessels. Ferrara’s team then translated that discovery into a therapy for wet age-related macular degeneration, a condition that causes causes blindness in the elderly.

And David Weatherall, a professor emeritus at the University of Oxford, won the Lasker Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Research for his work on a genetic form of anemia called thalassemia. Weatherall determined the biochemical cause of the disease, then developed tests and opened clinics across the developing world to find and treat children with thalassemia.