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Five world leaders in the field of endocrinology, and especially in the study and approach of pathologies of such impact as obesity and diabetes, are the new recipients of the “Princess of Asturias” award of Scientific and Technical Research 2024.
Specifically, the jury recognizes the merit of the Daniel J. Drucker, physician, (Canada); Jeffrey M. Friedmanmolecular biologist, (United States); Joel F. Habenerendocrinologist, (United States); Jens Juul Holst, chemist, (Denmark); and Svetlana Mojsovchemistry, (Macedonia and the United States), who could be considered the “fathers” of the pill to treat diabetes and obesity that has revolutionized the approach to these diseases.
As the jury explains in its minutes, “the research of the award-winning scientists has established the endocrine bases of diabetes and obesity, prominent pathologies that are a global public health problem without effective treatment to date.”
They add that Jeffrey M. Friedman has been a pioneer in establishing the genetic basis of the hormone that regulates appetite. Daniel J. Drucker, Joel F. Habener, Jens Juul Holst and Svetlana Mojsov have studied the effect of certain hormones that regulate insulin secretion and consequently glucose levels. These investigations have led to the development of treatments that are already available and that are improving the quality of life of hundreds of millions of people around the world.
These jobs are having a enormous clinical and social impact, since they have allowed for the first time the development of effective drugs to combat diabetes and obesity. In addition, they allow us to mitigate associated pathologies such as cardiovascular diseases.
This afternoon in Oviedo, the jury announced the winners of this award, for which this year 48 candidates from 17 nationalities were nominated, including some notable ones from the fields of geology, physics and molecular biology. For the anecdote, it will remain that the proposal for this award was made by the former “Princess” Prize for Scientific and Technical Research in 2021, Philip Felgner.
The jury is made up of Jesús del Álamo, Alberto Aparici Benages, Juan Luis Arsuaga Ferreras, Juan Ignacio Cirac Sastunkin, Avelino Corma Canós, Elena García Armada, Bernardo Hernández González, Jerónimo López Martínez, Amador Menéndez Velázquez, Ginés Morata Pérez, Peregrina Quintela Estévez , Inés Rodríguez Hidalgo, María Teresa Telleria Jorge, María Paz Zorzano Mier, chaired by Pedro Miguel Echenique Landiribar and with Cristina Garmendia Mendizábal as secretary.
An explanation of your contributions
As explained by the evaluators of the candidacy, in recent years there has been great progress in the treatment of type 2 diabetes, with the appearance of drugs that use semaglutide, a hormone-like peptide, glucagon, as an active ingredient. -1 or GLP-1, which plays a counterbalancing role for insulin in blood sugar balance.
When the sugar level drops, glucagon induces the liver to release glucose and when it rises, more insulin is generated, which is responsible for reducing the excess. In addition, semaglutide produces a notable reduction in appetite, which has made Ozempic, one of the drugs produced with this active ingredient, a success.
Science magazine designated these anti-obesity drugs as the greatest scientific advance of 2023.
Drucker, Habener, Holst and Mojsov share the recognition of having initiated and developed this research since the seventies of the last century. From their different laboratories, they studied the hormones that intervene in the process and regulate the digestive metabolism, such as somatostatin, which inhibits the production of glucagon and insulin, and variants of glucagon, called GLP-1 and GLP-2, and they verified that this homeostasis system could be an effective therapeutic target against type 2 diabetes.
Semaglutide (like some other similar molecules) works as an agonist of the GLP-1 glucagon receptor, therefore it inhibits the production of this hormone, reducing blood sugar levels and improving the growth of betapancreatic cells, responsible for its production. and insulin release. In addition, it has been proven to have protective effects against vascular accidents in adults with obesity, an indication recently authorized by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
For his part, Friedman discovered another hormone in 1994, leptin, which is generated in fat cells or adipocytes and acts on the brain region that controls appetite. It is a system in balance: the more fat there is, the more leptin is produced, which decreases appetite, reducing the body’s fat and therefore the production of leptin. In the case of obese people, this mechanism is unbalanced. He has also studied the genetic predisposition to obesity.
Four recognized names and a woman who fought to be recognized
Daniel J. Drucker (Montreal, Canada, June 26, 1956) He graduated in Medicine from the University of Toronto in 1980. He completed his medical internship between 1980 and 1981 at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and his residency at the University of Toronto, between 1980 and 1984. In 1984 he obtained a scholarship to work at the Massachusetts General Hospital and, in 1987, he joined Toronto General Hospital, where he worked until 2021. Since 2006 he has been a senior researcher at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital. He combines his research with teaching at the University of Toronto, where he has been a professor since 1987 and a professor since 1996. He is the author of some 430 scientific publications and 33 patents.
Jeffrey M. Friedman (Orlando, USA, July 20, 1954) He received his medical degree in 1977 from Albany Medical College, and his doctorate in 1986 from Rockefeller University.
His professional career has been linked to the Howard Hughes Institute of this university, first as an assistant researcher, then as an associate researcher and since 1988 as holder of the Marilyn M. Simpson chair. She has published 238 scientific articles, has received 59,201 citations, and has an h-index of 90. She is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. .
Joel F. Habener (born United States June 29, 1937) He received his Bachelor of Science from the University of Redlands in 1960 and his Doctor of Medicine from the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1965. He completed a residency as an intern at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. (1965-67) and at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Since 1973 he has combined research, teaching and clinical activity as professor of Medicine at Harvard University and director of the Molecular Endocrinology Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital. In 2006 he was named professor emeritus and remains active.
Jens Juul Holst (Copenhagen, Denmark, August 1, 1945) He graduated in 1970 and received his doctorate in 1978 in Medical Sciences from the University of Copenhagen. He combined his studies with clinical practices and research at the Bispebjerg Hospital and later, as a teacher and scientist at the Department of Medical Physiology at the University of Copenhagen, from 1977 to the present. In 2010 he was appointed scientific director of the Center for Basic Metabolic Research at Novo Nordisk Laboratories, based at the University of Copenhagen. He is co-founder of the companies Antag Therapeutics and Bainan Biotech. He was appointed scientific director of the Center for Basic Metabolic Research at Novo Nordisk Laboratories, based at the University of Copenhagen. He is co-founder of the companies Antag Therapeutics and Bainan Biotech.
Svetlana Mojsov (Skopje, North Macedonia, December 8, 1947) studied physics-chemistry in Belgrade and graduated in 1972 from Rockefeller University (USA). There he worked with the 1984 Nobel Prize in Chemistry Robert Merrifield and specialized in peptide synthesis. He later moved to Massachusetts General Hospital, where he identified the GLP-1 peptide, synthesized it and studied its function, in addition to developing antibodies against some of its sequences. In the nineties he returned to Rockefeller University. Despite his role in the discovery and study of GLP-1, his name was not recognized until he initiated a lawsuit demanding that articles that appeared in The New York Times, Nature and Cell be corrected. Science magazine published an extensive article in September 2023 explaining and acknowledging his contribution.
Scientific and Technical Research
This award is intended to recognize the “work of cultivating and perfecting research, discovery and/or invention in astronomy and astrophysics, medical sciences, technological sciences, Earth and space sciences, life, physics, mathematics and chemistry, as well as the disciplines corresponding to each of these fields and the techniques related to them”.
Last year, American biologists were honored with this award. Jeffrey Gordon and Peter Greenberg together with biochemistry Bonnie L. Bassler for his achievements in the search for new effective treatments against antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
In previous editions it was also obtained by artificial intelligence experts Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio and Demis Hassabis (2022), biochemists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna; chemists Avelino Corma, Mark E. Davis and Galen D. Stucky; the physicists Peter Higgs and François Englert, and the neurologists Joseph Altman, Arturo Álvarez-Buylla and Giacomo Rizzolatti.
The Scientific and Technical Research award is the seventh of the eight awards announced annually by the Princess of Asturias Foundation to fail, so in this XLIV edition only the Concordia award remains to be announced, on June 12.
The Princess of Asturias Awards ceremony will be held, as is traditional, in the month of October in a solemn ceremony presided over by the king and queen at the Campoamor Theater in Oviedo, accompanied by Princess Leonor and Infanta Sofía.
Each Princess of Asturias Award is endowed with a reproduction of a sculpture by Joan Miró – the representative symbol of the award -, an accrediting diploma, a badge and the cash amount of fifty thousand euros.