Joel Habener, Dan Drucker, Svetlana Mojsov and Jens Juul Holst

Newly powerful weight-loss drugs became the biggest story in health in the past year—and Dr. Jens Juul Holst, Dr. Joel Habener, Svetlana Mojsov, and Dr. Daniel Drucker played pivotal roles in making those medications possible. The scientists conducted the early work, beginning in the 1970s, on glucagon-like peptides, or GLPs, that first transformed the treatment of diabetes and now that of obesity.  [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] As with many groundbreaking medical developments, it was a group effort. Holst, at the University of Copenhagen (where he’s now professor of endocrinology and metabolism), noticed that after intestinal surgery, patients’ levels of insulin soared while their blood-sugar levels dropped; he attributed the changes to several gut-related hormones, including glucagon, which is made in the pancreas. Around the same time, an ocean and a continent away in Boston, Habener (who’s now professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital) and Drucker worked with animals in the lab at Massachusetts General Hospital and identified new types of glucagon hormones that they called GLP-1 and GLP-2. Mojsov, a chemist two floors away, also independently identified the active portion of GLP-1, which is mimicked in the new weight-loss drugs as the key compound in Ozempic and Wegovy (made by Novo Nordisk), and one of two main compounds in Mounjaro and Zepbound (made by Eli Lilly). Mojsov (who&rsquo...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Accolades franchise Magazine Special Project sponsorshipblock time100health2024 Source Type: news