TIME 100 HEALTH-PIONEERS

In the wake of the pandemic, a new era emerges-marked by fresh discoveries, novel treatments, and global victories over disease. These are the most influential people in health in 2024

- Alice Park

The GLP-1 scientists, Akiko Iwasaki, Michael J. Fox, Hadiza Galadanci, Vivek Murthy +92 more

Jens Juul Holst, Joel Habener, Svetlana Mojsov, and Dan Drucker PAVING THE WAY FOR WEIGHT-LOSS DRUGS

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

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.

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 dropped; he attributed the changes to several gut-related hormones, including glucagon, which is made in the pancreas. Around the same time, an ocean and a continent away in Boston, Habener and Drucker worked with animals in the lab at Massachusetts General Hospital and identified new types of glucagon hormones that they called GLP-1 and GLP-2. Mojsov, a chemist two floors away, also independently identified the active portion of GLP-1, which is mimicked in the new weight-loss drugs as the key compound in Ozempic and Wegovy (made by Novo Nordisk) and one of two main compounds in Mounjaro and Zepbound (made by Eli Lilly). Mojsov produced large amounts of the peptide and developed antibodies to stick to them. The trio eventually collaborated on critical scientific papers that described the active part of GLP-1 in the guts of rats, and documented that increasing GLP-1 levels corresponded to increasing levels of insulin.