Three GLP-1 scientists, including Novo Nordisk's Lotte Bjerre Knudsen, win 2024 Lasker Award

The 2024 Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award went to three scientists whose work led to GLP-1-based obesity drugs: Joel Habener of Massachusetts General Hospital, Svetlana Mojsov of The Rockefeller University, and Lotte Bjerre Knudsen of Novo Nordisk ^[1][2]. The Lasker Foundation said the three were honored "for the discovery and development of GLP-1-based drugs that have revolutionized the treatment of obesity" ^[1]. Habener and Mojsov worked out the physiologically active form of the hormone; Knudsen turned it into medicines that promote weight loss ^[1].

Mojsov's contribution was chemical. The predicted GLP-1 sequence ran 37 amino acids, but she noticed an arginine at position 6, a spot where human enzymes commonly cut. She argued the active peptide might instead start at amino acid 7. Working separately from Habener at the same hospital, she synthesized both the long GLP-1 (1-37) and the shorter GLP-1 (7-37) in pure form and made antibodies that could tell them apart ^[1]. In 1986, she, Habener and collaborators reported that the shorter peptide occurs naturally in the intestine. In 1987, with Gordon Weir of the Joslin Diabetes Center, they showed that tiny concentrations of GLP-1 (7-37) trigger insulin release from rat pancreases, while the longer form stayed inert even at 10,000-fold higher concentrations ^[1]. A 1992 human study with David Nathan at Massachusetts General Hospital found that GLP-1 prompts insulin release and lowers blood glucose ^[1][2].

One obstacle stood between that finding and a usable drug: in the body, GLP-1 disappears within minutes. The enzyme dipeptidyl peptidase 4 (DPP-4) breaks it down, and the kidneys clear the rest ^[1]. Knudsen, who took over GLP-1 therapeutic development at Novo Nordisk, settled on attaching fatty acids to the peptide so it would bind albumin, an abundant blood protein that could carry it and shield it from destruction ^[1]. Her team extended the half-life of a candidate called liraglutide from 1.2 hours to 13 hours after an injection under the skin. Liraglutide performed well in a 2010 trial of 1,300 people with type 2 diabetes, and the FDA approved it in 2010 as Victoza, the first once-daily GLP-1-based drug ^[1]. In a key obesity study, nondiabetic adults who were obese or overweight lost an average of more than 12 pounds over a year; more than one-third lost at least 5% of body weight and almost one-fourth lost more than 10% ^[1]. It won FDA approval for obesity in 2014 as Saxenda ^[1].

A later Novo Nordisk team, led by chemists Jesper Lau and Thomas Kruse, screened about 4,000 compounds to find one that lasted longer. They replaced one amino acid to resist DPP-4 and tested different fatty acids and linkers, arriving at semaglutide, with a half-life of 165 hours — long enough for weekly dosing ^[1]. Liraglutide and semaglutide are the molecules behind today's injectable GLP-1 products, and semaglutide is also the active ingredient in an oral form. The first GLP-1 receptor agonist approved at all was exenatide, a DPP-4-resistant peptide based on a substance from lizard venom, cleared in 2005 for type 2 diabetes ^[2].

Why it matters for patients

The award is a recognition of laboratory and drug-development history, not a new study result. It does not change what any GLP-1 prescription contains, how it is dosed, what it costs, or what is known about its risks ^[1][2]. The foundation placed the work in context: almost 900 million adults worldwide live with obesity, including as many as 40% of US adults and close to 25% in Europe ^[1]. It also noted that obesity is often treated as a failure of willpower even though diet and exercise do not resolve it for many people, and that earlier attempts at safe, effective weight-loss drugs fell short ^[1]. For patients, the practical takeaway is narrower: the drugs now in wide use descend from a specific line of research that began with a hormone isolated from fish and rat tissue, and the award marks that lineage rather than any new finding about the medicines themselves. No new clinical trial data, label change, or safety finding was disclosed in the award announcement ^[1][2].

The prize is given by the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation and was announced in September 2024; the accompanying summary appeared in the Journal of Clinical Investigation on October 1, 2024 ^[2]. Whether the work will receive further recognition has not been reported.