He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Erwin Neher in 1991 for their work on "the function of single ion channels in cells," and the invention of the patch clamp.

In 1971 he moved to University College London, where he worked in the Department of Biophysics under Bernard Katz.

[3] Afterwards (still in 1974), Sakmann returned to the lab of Otto Creutzfeldt, who had meanwhile moved to the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen.

In 1986, Sakmann and Erwin Neher were awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University.

In 1987, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which is the highest honour awarded in German research.