The Research Princess applauds and promotes the fight against diabetes and obesity

There are five scientists. Three work in the US, one in Canada and another in Denmark. And they have all managed to nail down how diabetes and obesity work and their work has contributed to putting effective drugs on the market against two diseases that affect millions of people around the world. Their names, which are already printed in capital letters in the history of medicine, are: Daniel J. Drucker, Jeffrey, M. Friedman, Joel F. Habener, Jens Juul Holst and Svetlana Mojsov.

“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,” wrote the jury, which stressed that their discoveries are having a enormous clinical and social impact, since they have allowed “the development of effective drugs” to combat both diseases. Added to this is that they mitigate other associated pathologies, such as cardiovascular diseases.

«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 Svet ana Mojsov have studied the effect of certain hormones that regulate insulin secretion and consequently glucose levels,” summarizes the jury chaired by Pedro Miguel Echenique, who put the focus on an issue that is a universal public health issue.

The work of all of them, in Canada, the United States and Denmark, has led to an optimistic here and now, since in recent years there has been great progress in the treatment of type 2 diabetes, with the appearance of drugs that use The active ingredient is semaglutide, a peptide similar to a hormone, glucagon-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,” they say from the Princess of Asturias Foundation to express the value of a discovery that goes further. beyond diabetes itself, since they have shown that semaglutide produces a notable reduction in appetite, and that has made Ozempic, one of the drugs produced with this active ingredient, a global success. So much so that even ‘Science’ magazine designated these anti-obesity drugs as the greatest scientific advance of 2023.

But this story that is beginning to have a happy ending began a long time ago. Drucker, Habener, Holst and Mojsov began their research in the seventies of the last century. They studied, each in their laboratory, 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 verified that this homeostasis system could be an effective therapeutic target against type 2 diabetes.

Semaglutide, as happens with some other similar molecules, works as an agonist of the glucagon GLP-1 receptor, therefore it inhibits the production of this hormone, reducing blood sugar levels and improving the growth of betapancreatic cells, responsible for the production and release of insulin. 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.

Friedman, for his part, found 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. It happens that in the case of obese people this mechanism is unbalanced. He has also studied the genetic predisposition to obesity.

The fusion of everything discovered has charted the path of more than half a century of research that is now becoming drugs that change the lives of millions of people. Quite a prize.

Drucker is Canadian and works in Toronto at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute Mount Sinai Hospital. Internationally recognized, his laboratory researches new treatments for type 2 diabetes and a new therapy for patients with short bowel syndrome. His work is also crucial in the treatment of obesity. He studies a family of hormones produced in the pancreas, gastrointestinal tract and brain. By controlling blood glucose and insulin secretion, these hormones also regulate appetite, the absorption of nutrients from food, and the conversion of nutrients into energy. His goal is to know more about the action of hormones that regulate multiple aspects of metabolism.

Jeffrey M. Friedman is an American molecular geneticist at Rockefeller University in New York, who studies the molecular and neural mechanisms that regulate food intake and body weight. Genetic studies in mice have led him and his team to identify leptin, a hormone produced by adipose tissue that plays a key role in controlling hunger and weight. He is trying to identify the mechanisms by which leptin regulates energy balance and is working to find other key regulators of body weight.

Joel F. Habener is a professor at Harvard Medical School and his laboratory faces the not easy task of understanding the pathogenesis of diabetes mellitus. His team seeks to understand the mechanisms of the disease in order to develop effective treatments to restore insulin sensitivity, insulin production and nutrient homeostasis in people with diabetes.

Jens Juul Holst brings the award closer to Europe, since he practices in Denmark. He is one of the leading experts on diabetes, as he discovered the insulin-stimulating hormone GLP-1. He is Professor of Medical Physiology and Scientific Director of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research, Section of Translational Metabolic Physiology, Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, University of Copenhagen. His interest is in the physiology of peptide hormones and neurotransmitters, particularly those related to pancreatic and gastrointestinal functions and signaling.

Finally, North Macedonian biochemist Svetlana Mojsov also practices at Rockefeller University in New York and her work has led to widely used treatments for diabetes and weight loss. Mojsov seeks to understand how peptides and small proteins regulate physiological processes in states of health and disease. She is, according to her university, co-inventor of a series of patents for the use of GLP-1 for the treatment of diabetes that were licensed to the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk. From there a new class of drugs emerged that are today used in people with type 2 diabetes and obesity to control their glucose levels or lose weight.