Image: Courtesy of Joel Habener
Harvard Medical School researcher Joel Habener has won the 2024 Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for his discovery of glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), a molecule that has become the basis for therapies which have transformed the treatment of obesity.
Lasker awards, sometimes called “America’s Nobels,” are among the world’s most prestigious biomedical and clinical research awards.
Habener, professor of medicine at HMS and director of the Laboratory of Molecular Endocrinology at Massachusetts General Hospital, shares the prize with biochemist Svetlana Mojsov, of Rockefeller University, and with Danish scientist Lotte Bjerre Knudsen, of Novo Nordisk.
The understanding of the complex hormonal interplay underlying the regulation of blood sugar stems from the work of many scientists. However, the independent discoveries made by Habener, Mojsov, and Knudsen converged to enable the design of disease-altering therapies for type 2 diabetes, which affects nearly 400 million people worldwide, and obesity, estimated to affect about one billion globally.
Video: Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation
In the 1990s, Knudsen, the head of GLP-1 therapeutics at Novo Nordisk, and her team transformed these insights into treatments to fight diabetes and obesity. Notably, they modified the drugs in a way that allowed them to linger in the body for longer, extending their therapeutic effects from a few hours to a week.
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“The work of Joel Habener and his award co-recipients is an elegant demonstration of the power of basic science. It shows how insights made in the laboratory and observations at the patient bedside can feed and amplify each other, leading to transformative therapies,” said George Q. Daley, dean of HMS. “The work of these researchers has reshaped the future for millions with obesity and type 2 diabetes.”
Through their discoveries and dedicated efforts, Habener, Mojsov, and Knudsen have introduced a new era of weight management, dramatically improving the health and well-being of hundreds of millions, the foundation said in its award citation.
This work has opened up a burgeoning field of research to better define the mechanisms behind additional health benefits that have begun to emerge from GLP-1 therapy, such as improvement in heart function, chronic kidney disorders, fatty liver disease, and more.
Adapted from a Lasker Foundation news release.
