Jens Juul Holst, Joel Habener, Svetlana Mojsov, and Dan Drucker
PAVING THE WAY FOR WEIGHT-LOSS DRUGS Newly powerful weight-loss drugs became the biggest story in health in the past year—and Jens Juul Holst, Joel Habener, Svetlana Mojsov, and Dan Drucker played pivotal roles in making those medications possible. The scientists conducted the early work, beginning in the 1970s, on glucagon-like peptides, or GLPs, that first transformed the treatment of diabetes and now that of obesity.
‘If [GLP-1 drugs] show benefit for even half of these conditions, then that will be a tremendous win for people struggling with them.’ —Dan Drucker As with many groundbreaking medical developments, it was a group effort. Holst, at the University of Copenhagen, noticed that after intestinal surgery, patients’ levels of insulin soared while their blood-sugar levels…
