Obesity Drug Pioneers Win Distinguished Lasker Award for Medical Science

Obesity Drug Pioneers Win Distinguished Lasker Award for Medical Science

Written by Mariana Lenharo & Nature Magazine

Three scientists who contributed to the development of anti-obesity drugs that are currently revolutionizing health are among the winners of this year’s prestigious Lasker Awards. The awards, which honor important advances in medical research, are often seen as a predictor of whether a particular innovator or scientist will win a Nobel Prize – and some think this could be occur recently for weight loss treatment.

Joel Habener, Svetlana Mojsov and Lotte Bjerre Knudsen each contributed to the development of popular anti-obesity drugs, which mimic the hormone glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1), which is involved in lowering glucose levels blood pressure and appetite control. The three, accepted through Lasker in the medical research group, will share the prize of US$250,000.

Biomedical scientists are interested in the increasing attention of GLP-1 research, which was originally intended to treat diabetes. “I’ve been dealing with this for 30 years, and for a long time no one cared,” says Randy Seeley, an obesity expert at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “In the last few years, the situation has changed a lot. Now we have treatments that really help people.”

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Other recipients of this year’s Lasker Awards include Zhijian ‘James’ Chen at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, who was honored in the basic research category for discovering how DNA produces answers to ‘ how the body and the infection. In the community service category, Salim Abdool Karim and Quarraisha Abdool Karim, both at the Center for AIDS Research in South Africa, Durban, were recognized for developing life-saving methods to prevent and treat HIV infection.

Among the sciences

Habener, an endocrinologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, was a pioneer in the discovery of the GLP-1 hormone in the 1980s. He was interested in understanding the hormones involved in type 2 diabetes, a condition characterized by high blood sugar, in which the body does not produce enough insulin or has difficulty using it to absorb the sugar. in the blood.

Habener contributed to glucagon, a hormone that increases blood sugar levels. After making a version of glucagon, he discovered that the particle also secreted a related hormone – later named GLP-1 – that stimulates the pancreas to produce insulin.

“This was interesting because, instead of giving insulin injections to diabetics to control blood sugar, giving GLP-1 would cause the body to make its own insulin. ,” says Habener.

Around that time, Mojsov, a biochemist who ran a synthetic protein lab at Massachusetts General Hospital, identified the sequence of amino acids that make up the biologically active form of GLP-1. Eventually, he would show that this active form could cause insulin to be released from the pancreas of rats – a necessary step on the way to a human treatment.

Now at Rockefeller University in New York City, Mojsov spoke last year about the lack of respect for his contributions to the field. Since then, he has received awards such as the VinFuture Award. He says: “I’m happy that I’m getting awards, but what makes me happier is that people actually read my work.

After the first discovery of GLP-1, researchers realized that there is a big obstacle in its therapeutic use: the hormone was made quickly, taking only a few minutes in the blood. This is where the work of Knudsen, a scientist at the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, Copenhagen, came into play. He and his team realized that normal GLP-1 would not work as a drug, Knudsen says. Instead, the researchers came up with a way to modify GLP-1 by attaching a fatty acid to it – a modification that allowed the molecule to remain active in the body for a longer period of time before being degraded.

The work resulted in liraglutide, the first long-acting GLP-1 drug, approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2010 for type 2 diabetes. Meanwhile, researchers were they have been exploring the drug’s weight-loss potential, and in 2014, liraglutide became the first molecule in its class to be approved for the treatment of obesity. Today, newer drugs, including semaglutide and tirzepatide, marketed as Wegovy and Zepbound, are important obesity treatments.

Knudsen says: “I really hope to inspire young people so that they can see that you can do great science in the pharmaceutical industry.”

Nobel first?

Drugs based on GLP-1 do not only treat obesity and diabetes. Studies have shown that it can help with heart disease, sleeping sickness and kidney disease, among other conditions. These benefits are thought to be due to the drug’s effects on the brain, as well as its anti-inflammatory properties.

Because of the movement of these drugs to cause health care, some think that soon they can win the main prize of science – Nobel. Winning a Lasker often precedes winning a Nobel Prize: since 1945, 95 Lasker winners have also received the top honor. “This raises the stakes that the Nobel committee will take [GLP-1 research] seriously,” says Seeley. The Nobel Prizes will be announced next month. Each science prize is limited to no more than three winners, and the challenge will be to select the most deserving. Several other scientists involved in GLP-1-based drug research have received other awards, including Jens Juul Holst of the University of Copenhagen, Daniel Drucker of the University of Toronto in Canada, and Richard DiMarchi at Indiana University in Bloomington. “It’s 10,000 ants moving the ant, and we try to pick three ants that made a big difference,” says Seeley. “You can come up with the names of a dozen people, at least, who have made major contributions to the field.”

This article was reproduced with permission and was first published on September 19, 2024.