The winner of the Lasker Award for medical science is an obese drug pioneer
Obesity is a Disease: A Murkiness about the Oprah Winfrey Miracle and the End of the Muzziness
“Obesity is a disease,” Oprah Winfrey declared after disclosing her weight loss with an Ozempic-like drug. The doctor said on the 60 Minutes show that it was a brain disease. There is a discover page for “Obesity is disease” on TikTok.
B.M.I. was always difficult to determine, in an era of effective weight loss drugs it is no longer possible. Forty percent of American adults are classified as obese if they have a B.M.I. of 30 or above. With new treatments that cost upward of $1,000 per person per month, along with supply shortages, how to define obesity is more than just a fight over nomenclature. It is about figuring out who is sick and who will benefit from health care and how to allocate resources the most effectively. It’s about ending the murkiness that has surrounded obesity diagnosis for decades.
Lasker Award for Medical Science honors obesity-drug pioneers for prestigious medical science: Randy Seeley discusses his experience with the GLP-1 gene
The shake-up of these drugs in health care may lead to them winning a prize like the Nobel, some think. Winning a Lasker often precedes winning a Nobel prize: since 1945, 95 Lasker laureates have also received that top honour. According to Seeley, this raises the possibility that the gold medal committee will pay more attention to GLP-1 research. The awards will be announced in a couple of weeks.
Biomedical scientists are enthusiastic about the increasing recognition of GLP-1 research, which was initially aimed at treating diabetes. For a long time, nobody cared about Randy Seeley, an obese specialist at the University of Michigan. “Over the last several years, the situation has changed so much. We have more therapies that are helping people.
There is a basic research category in the Lasker Awards which was won by JamesChen at the UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. In the public-service category, the Centre for AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa was recognized for their life- saving approaches to prevent and treat HIV infections.
Habener zeroed in on glucagon, a hormone that increases blood-sugar levels. He discovered that after he cloned the glucagon gene, it also held a hormone called GLP-1 that stimulates the pancreas to produceinsulin 1.
Source: Obesity-drug pioneers win prestigious Lasker Award for medical science
The VinFuture Prize: How do we know you’re doing this? Telling us what you’ve been waiting for with GLP-1-based drugs
Now at Rockefeller University in New York City, Mojsov spoke out last year about the lack of recognition for her contribution to the field. Since then, she has received awards such as the VinFuture Prize. She says she is happy that people are liking her work, but she is even more pleased that they are actually reading it.
Each prize in a science discipline is limited to no more than three winners, and the challenge will be to select the most deserving recipients. Several other scientists involved in the research behind GLP-1-based drugs have been recognized by other awards, including Jens Juul Holst at the University of Copenhagen, Daniel Drucker at the University of Toronto in Canada, and Richard DiMarchi at Indiana University in Bloomington.
“It’s 10,000 ants that move the anthill, and we’re trying to pick out the three ants that made the most difference,” Seeley says. There are at least a dozen people who have made seminal contributions to the field.
