Lotte Knudsen, who pushed Novo Nordisk into the Ozempic era, wins STAT Innovation Prize

BIn the 1990s, scientist Lotte Bjerre Knudsen was tasked with revitalizing a struggling program at Novo Nordisk that was attempting to harness the newly discovered hormone GLP-1 into viable drug candidates for diabetes.

At the time, many Knudsens executives had already lost hope in this program. After all, Novos focused on insulin, and the natural hormone GLP-1 had too short a half-life to be used as a medicine.

But Knudsen continues to see the potential for treating not only diabetes, but also obesity, with GLP-1-based drugs, she said Wednesday at the STAT Summit in Boston. I was always the one saying: don’t forget GLP-1 and tough decisions within the company.

Eventually, she found a way to make a long-acting analogue of GLP-1 that became liraglutide, the ingredient in the diabetes drug Victoza and later the obesity drug Saxenda. This paved the way for Novo to develop an even more potent GLP-1 analogue called semaglutide, the ingredient in what has now become the blockbuster treatments Ozempic and Wegovy.

Thanks to Knudsen’s work and persistence, Novo’s latest drugs are revolutionizing the way doctors treat obesity and giving rise to an entire industry of drugmakers pursuing weight-loss drugs, a market that some analysts say could reach $100 billion by the end of the decade.

It also helped make Novo a much more well-known name. Knudsen said that when he visited the United States in the 1990s from Denmark, no one knew what the Novo Nordisk company was. They were all just like, Oh, are you from Novartis?

For her contributions to this new generation of treatments, Knudsen was named the recipient of the STATs 2023 Biomedical Innovation Award.

STAT recently did an exclusive interview with her to discuss her upbringing in rural Scandinavia, her early days in scientific laundry detergent manufacturing, and her decades of work on GLP-1 drugs.

As researchers continue to study the effects of GLP-1 drugs, the treatments may prove to have many more benefits beyond reducing blood sugar and weight loss. They have recently been shown to reduce the risk of cardiovascular complications and may also help combat addictions and even treat Alzheimer’s disease.

Knudsen said her interest in Alzheimer’s disease began when she was studying the effects of GLP-1 drugs on the heart. She found that the treatments helped lower blood pressure and treat other cardiovascular risk factors by regulating inflammation, leading her to hypothesize that the drugs might also help relieve inflammation. of the brain and to fight against Alzheimer’s disease. Novo Nordisk is currently investigating the use of semaglutide in patients with Alzheimer’s disease in a phase 3 trial.

In the future, she sees the potential of using proteomics and metabolism, large-scale studies of proteins and metabolites, to determine whether GLP-1 drugs could be useful in even more diseases.

Although Knudsen faced a lot of criticism about the GLP-1 program early on, she said she was glad to have spent her career at a large pharmaceutical company, where she was able to work with large teams to transport medications to the clinic, then to the laboratory. walk. I hear young people say, “I’m not really sure I want to go into the industry, because I probably won’t have a choice, I’ll be told what to do.” And I would just say, well, look at me, right? she says.

“I’ve had a very interesting career where I’ve always let science guide me,” she added. Whether it was laundry detergents in the beginning or major medications later, I have always let science guide me.

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