GLP-1 based drugs are transforming the treatment of obesity and opening up new avenues for addressing heart disease, addiction, and even Alzheimer’s. Now, three scientists who played key roles in their invention have won a prestigious Lasker Award for biomedical research.
Announced on Thursday in New York, the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award will be shared by Svetlana Mojsov and Joel Habener, who identified and characterized the GLP-1 hormone in the 1980s while at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Lotte Knudsen of the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, who led the team that created the first GLP-1-mimicking drug approved for obesity.
The Lasker — sometimes referred to as “America’s Nobel” — is the most prestigious award to recognize Mojsov, who was the first person to uncover the chemically active form of GLP-1, a critical step in creating a viable drug. As detailed in a STAT investigation last year, Mojsov spent a decade battling with her former employer to get her name on the patents as a co-inventor, and has seen her work sidelined from the GLP-1 story as passed down through scientific reviews.
“It is a tremendous honor for me,” Mojsov, now at Rockefeller University, said in an interview. She sees the decision to recognize her, Habener, and Knudsen as celebrating the arc of science from the beginning to the end of creating a transformative treatment. It honors the “progression from discovery, which was made in academia on the bench, to development by the pharmaceutical company to a medicine,” she said. “So I think it’s very appropriate.”
In the last few years, as the explosive impacts of metabolism-correcting, weight-moderating medicines like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro have reverberated through the health care universe, the GLP-1 story has increasingly grown in Nobel promise. This latest recognition bolsters that possibility; about a fourth of Lasker laureates have gone on to win the Swedish award, too.
Which is why today’s announcement is sure to turn heads.
“This is a celebration of the science and the transformative effect that this has had on treatment of a syndrome — call it a disease, if you will — that people thought was not possible to treat,” said Richard DiMarchi, a friend of Mojsov and a chemistry professor at Indiana University Bloomington who has worked on newer versions of drugs that harness GLP-1 biology.
The discovery of GLP-1 has been recognized with many previous awards, including the Harrington Prize for Innovation in Medicine in 2017, the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize in 2020, and, the next year, the Canada Gairdner International Award. In each of those cases, the award committee named three male doctors to share the prize: Habener, his former postdoc Daniel Drucker, and Jens Holst, a Danish researcher who independently reported important findings on GLP-1 shortly after the Mass General researchers did.
In June, after STAT and the journal Science revealed Mojsov’s overlooked role in the GLP-1 story, she finally broke through, sharing with Habener and Holst the Tang Prize in Biopharmaceutical Science. With Habener and Drucker, she was also named to the TIME list of the 100 most influential people of 2024.
In the last two years since Habener gave up his lab at Mass General and the GLP-1 craze has really taken off, dealing with the parade of awards has started to become “a full-time occupation,” he told STAT. That turn of fate couldn’t be more surprising to Habener, who had no idea back when his lab was working on GLP-1 in the late 1980s that it would turn out to be such a biopharmaceutical blockbuster.
“It’s just totally unexpected,” he said, adding that he’s happy to be sharing the award with Mojsov. “I think it’s wonderful that she was chosen.”
Assigning credit for scientific awards is a complicated, messy business, especially for something like GLP-1 drugs, which were developed in fits and starts over more than 50 years. “Science doesn’t work the way the awards want to make it work,” said Randy Seeley, director of the Michigan Nutrition Obesity Research Center, who has followed the development of these drugs and has consulted for companies making them. “Most of these things are 10,000 ants moving an ant hill, and it’s all the scurry of all those 10,000 ants that actually, ultimately make a difference.”
Still, he said Knudsen’s contributions — although they might be harder to spot in her publication record because of working in the drug industry — are entirely deserving of this year’s Lasker. ”Until the last three years, nobody believed that was going to make any money, and so she went through a decade of championing this idea in the face of lots of pushback,” he said. Seeley — who sat on the scientific advisory board of Novo starting in the 2000s — saw that she was doing a lot of work within Novo at the time to convince people of the idea of treating people with obesity. “Lotte was very clear about believing this at a time when not everybody else was nearly as clear,” Seeley said.
Knudsen, who STAT named as its 2023 Biomedical Innovation Award winner, said she was thrilled to see industry science getting recognized because of its reputation among academics as being “the dark side,” and she thinks it’s important for young scientists to know you can do impactful work from inside a company. But she also emphasized that although it’s her name on the award, she represents many researchers at Novo Nordisk, including the chemists who invented liraglutide and semaglutide and the teams of scientists who ran the company’s clinical trials. “Broad recognition matters to me,” she said.
More than any prize though, what she finds rewarding about her work on GLP-1 drugs is the way the availability of an effective medicine has catalyzed interest among researchers and funders to better understand obesity — which she hopes will help end the stigma around it — as well as GLP-1’s role in many other diseases. “There is no other example in the history of medicine for one biology to do so many different things at the same time,” Knudsen said. “We’re just starting to see its different effects in many tissues, and it’s likely there are still more to find.”
In just the last year, GLP-1 drugs have been shown to help lower body mass in children with obesity; cut the risk of heart failure, again; lower the risk of cirrhosis in patients with liver disease; and reduce the progression of kidney disease. “The constant good news and really impressive outcomes coming out of these studies have bolstered the evidence base for the medical community that really supports the value of these medicines,” said Drucker, which is just another reason it makes sense to see them being recognized.
As to being left out of this prize, Drucker, who is now a professor of medicine at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute in Toronto, didn’t have any hard feelings. “There were many people at the very beginning who made important contributions,” he said. “Some people waking up in Europe will say that Jens Holst should have been recognized. At the end of the day, the awards committee has the tough job of sorting through the various narratives and lifting up some of them. That’s just the world we live in.”
The recognition, which since 1945 has been given to outstanding contributions to medicine by the Mary and Albert Lasker Foundation, is awarded in three categories, each carrying a $250,000 prize. All Lasker award categories have a maximum of three recipients.
The Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award went to Zhijan “James” Chen of the UT Southwestern Medical Center, who unraveled a key signaling mechanism of the innate immune system. Chen discovered that the body senses foreign DNA inside of cells through an enzyme called cGas, which then alerts the body’s pathogen-fighting forces to the presence of a threat. This breakthrough “solved a pivotal biomedical mystery of how DNA stimulates immune and inflammatory response,” and provides key insights for better treating infectious diseases and cancer and for managing autoimmune diseases, the foundation said.
The Lasker-Bloomberg Public Service Award was shared by Quarraisha Abdool Karim and Salim S. Abdool Karim of Columbia University in New York and the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA), which the wife-and-husband team helped to establish in 2002. Through their efforts, they have trained hundreds of scientists and helped to establish world-class HIV/AIDS research centers across Africa.
Their work has uncovered the disproportionate impact of the disease on women and girls and the need for integration of HIV-prevention efforts into sexual and reproductive health services. They also led a groundbreaking study that provided the first evidence that antiretroviral drugs prevent sexually acquired HIV in women — which laid the foundation for pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, a highly effective method of HIV prevention now endorsed by the World Health Organization.
“The Abdool Karims have saved lives around the globe through their innovative research, evidence-based policy proposals, public education, and courage to speak truth to power,” the foundation said.