Scientists Who Pioneered GLP-1 Drugs Honored With Lasker Award

Each year, the Lasker Awards honor a number of medical professionals doing standout work in research and public service. The New York Times has called the awards “the nation’s most prestigious medical prizes.” And this year, among the winners are the scientists whose work led to the creation of drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, substances that have the ability to make dramatic changes in people’s health.

Citing their work in “the discovery and development of GLP-1-based drugs that have revolutionized the treatment of obesity,” the Lasker Foundation presented the 2024 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award to Joel Habener of Massachusetts General Hospital, Lotte Bjerre Knudsen of Novo Nordisk and Svetlana Mojsov of The Rockefeller University. (The foundation also presents awards for basic research and public service.)

“Historically, attempts to make safe and effective drugs that help people slim down have fallen short,” the foundation wrote in its citation for the trio. “Habener, Mojsov and Knudsen have introduced a new era of weight management in which GLP-1-based pharmaceuticals promise to dramatically enhance health.”

The specifics of how Habener, Mojsov and Knudsen researched this subject illustrate just how long the path towards commercially available GLP-1 drugs has been. Habener began researching diabetes in the 1970s and went on to the gene that encodes glucagon in fish. Beginning in the 1980s, Mojsov’s research helped scientists identify and distinguish between different kinds of GLP-1. Meanwhile, Knudsen’s research was crucial for creating GLP-1s that were not rapidly absorbed into the bloodsteam.

The Future of Ozempic Is Coming Into Focus

Compounding pharmacies are still doing a brisk business in alternatives

Receiving the Lasker Prize is an impressive honor for any scientist. As Nature‘s Mariana Lenharo observed, a Lasker Award isn’t only prestigious in its own right — it often predicts a future Nobel Prize win. Could the development of Ozempic wind up enshrining new Nobel laureates? We’ll have to wait and see, but the odds of that happening just got better.