We admit to loving coffee, but a few researchers say they have found something better - a shpritz that may be able to treat sleepiness. The nasal spray contains a naturally occurring brain hormone called orexin A, and a study found it reversed the effects of sleep deprivation in monkeys, allowing them to perform like well-rested monkeys on cognitive tests, according to Wired magazine.

Its first use will probably be to treat severe sleep disorder narcolepsy. This may represent “a totally new route for increasing arousal, and the new study shows it to be relatively benign,” Jerome Siegel, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA and a co-author of the study, which was published last week in The Journal of Neuroscience. “It reduces sleepiness without causing edginess.”

In the study, the monkeys were deprived of sleep for 30 to 36 hours and then given either orexin A or a saline placebo before taking standard cognitive tests. The monkeys given orexin A in a nasal spray scored about the same as alert monkeys, while the saline-control group was severely impaired. The upshot - orexin A not only restored cognitive abilities but made the monkey brains look “awake” in PET scans, the mag writes.

The research follows the discovery by Siegel that the absence of orexin A appears to cause narcolepsy, Wired notes. That finding pointed to a major role for the peptide’s absence in causing sleepiness. And so it stood to reason that if the deficit of orexin A makes people sleepy, adding it back into the brain would reduce the effects, Siegel says. “What we’ve been doing so far is increasing arousal without dealing with the underlying problem,” he tells the mag. “If the underlying deficit is a loss of orexin, and it clearly is, then the best treatment would be orexin.”

But don’t be hasty and pack away your coffee mug just yet. Orexin A may be a promising candidate to become a “sleep replacement” drug, but that would still be years away. Somebody, please, pass the sugar.