September 19, 2024
4 min learn
Weight problems-Drug Pioneers Win Prestigious Lasker Award for Medical Science
Three scientists are honored for creating a category of blockbuster weight-loss medication. Is a Nobel prize on the best way?
Joel Habener (from left), Lotte Bjerre Knudsen and Svetlana Mojsov have gained a 2024 Lasker Award for creating a category of medicine that treats weight problems, diabetes and extra.
Joel Habener; Soren Svendsen; Chris Taggart courtesy of The Rockefeller College
Three scientists concerned in creating the blockbuster anti-obesity medication which might be presently altering the health-care panorama are among the many winners of this yr’s prestigious Lasker Awards. The prizes, which honour vital advances in medical analysis, are sometimes thought of an indicator of whether or not a selected advance or scientist will win a Nobel Prize — and a few are speculating that this might quickly be the case for the weight-loss remedies.
Joel Habener, Svetlana Mojsov and Lotte Bjerre Knudsen every contributed to the creation of the favored anti-obesity medication, which mimic a hormone referred to as glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1), concerned in reducing blood-sugar ranges and controlling urge for food. The trio, acknowledged with a Lasker within the clinical-research class, will share a US$250,000 prize.
Biomedical scientists are enthusiastic concerning the growing recognition of GLP-1 analysis, which was initially aimed toward treating diabetes. “I’ve been working on this for 30 years, and for a long time nobody cared,” says Randy Seeley, an weight problems specialist on the College of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “Over the last several years, the situation has changed so much. We now have therapies that are actually helping people.”
On supporting science journalism
If you happen to’re having fun with this text, take into account supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By buying a subscription you’re serving to to make sure the way forward for impactful tales concerning the discoveries and concepts shaping our world at the moment.
Different recipients of this yr’s Lasker Awards embody Zhijian ‘James’ Chen at UT Southwestern Medical Middle in Dallas, Texas, who was honoured within the basic-research class for locating how DNA triggers immune and inflammatory responses. Within the public-service class, Salim Abdool Karim and Quarraisha Abdool Karim, each on the Centre for AIDS Programme of Analysis in South Africa, in Durban, have been acknowledged for creating life-saving approaches to forestall and deal with HIV infections.
Contained in the science
Habener, an endocrinologist at Massachusetts Common Hospital in Boston, was a pacesetter in discovering the GLP-1 hormone within the Eighties. He was serious about understanding the hormones concerned in sort 2 diabetes, a situation characterised by excessive blood-sugar ranges, during which the physique both doesn’t produce sufficient insulin or has bother utilizing it to soak up sugar from the blood.
Habener zeroed in on glucagon, a hormone that will increase blood-sugar ranges. After cloning the gene for glucagon, he found that the gene additionally encoded a associated hormone — later named GLP-1 — that stimulates the pancreas to provide insulin.
Illustration of a glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor (blue) binding to a semaglutide molecule (crimson), forming an activated complicated. Semaglutide is a GLP-1 receptor agonist, a kind of drug that mimics the operate of pure GLP-1 hormones.
Juan Gaertner/Science Picture Library/Getty Pictures
“This was interesting because, rather than having to give injections of insulin to people with diabetes to control blood sugar, giving GLP-1 would theoretically prompt the body to make its own insulin,” Habener says.
Round that point, Mojsov, a biochemist who directed a facility producing artificial proteins at Massachusetts Common Hospital, recognized the sequence of amino acids making up the biologically energetic type of GLP-1. Ultimately, she would display that this energetic kind may stimulate insulin launch from a rat pancreas — a obligatory step on the trail to a human therapy.
Now at Rockefeller College in New York Metropolis, Mojsov spoke out final yr concerning the lack of recognition for her contribution to the sphere. Since then, she has obtained awards such because the VinFuture Prize. “I’m happy that I’m getting awards, but what makes me even happier is that people are actually reading my work,” she says.
After the preliminary discoveries about GLP-1, researchers realized that there was a big impediment to its therapeutic use: the hormone was quickly metabolized, lasting only some minutes within the blood. That’s the place the work of Knudsen, a scientist at pharmaceutical agency Novo Nordisk, in Copenhagen, got here in. She and her group realized that common GLP-1 was not going to work as a medication, Knudsen says. As a substitute, the researchers got here up with a strategy to modify GLP-1 by attaching a fatty acid to it — an alteration that allowed the molecule to stay energetic within the physique for an prolonged interval earlier than degrading.
The work resulted in liraglutide, the primary long-lasting GLP-1-based drug, permitted by the US Meals and Drug Administration in 2010 for sort 2 diabetes. Within the meantime, researchers have been already exploring the medication’ weight-loss potential, and in 2014, liraglutide turned the primary molecule in its class to be permitted for treating weight problems. Right this moment, newer variants, together with semaglutide and tirzepatide, offered as Wegovy and Zepbound, are vital weight problems remedies.
“I really hope to inspire young people so that they can see that you can do great science also in the pharmaceutical industry,” Knudsen says.
Nobel forward?
GLP-1-based medication don’t simply deal with weight problems and diabetes. Research have proven they can assist with heart problems, sleep apnea and kidney illness, amongst different circumstances. These advantages are thought to come up from the medication’ results on the mind, in addition to their anti-inflammatory potential.
Owing to the shake-up these medication are inflicting in well being care, some assume they may quickly win science’s high prize — the Nobel. Profitable a Lasker typically precedes profitable a Nobel prize: since 1945, 95 Lasker laureates have additionally obtained that high honour. “This raises the spectre that the Nobel committee will take [GLP-1 research] seriously,” Seeley says. The Nobel prizes might be introduced subsequent month.Every prize in a science self-discipline is restricted to not more than three winners, and the problem might be to pick probably the most deserving recipients. A number of different scientists concerned within the analysis behind GLP-1-based medication have been acknowledged by different awards, together with Jens Juul Holst on the College of Copenhagen, Daniel Drucker on the College of Toronto in Canada, and Richard DiMarchi at Indiana College in Bloomington.“It’s 10,000 ants that move the anthill, and we’re trying to pick out the three ants that made the most difference,” Seeley says. “You could come up with a dozen names of people, at least, who have made seminal contributions to the field.”
This text is reproduced with permission and was first printed on September 19, 2024.
