Closer Look
Lotte Knudsen's determination — and patience — sparked a revolution in how we think of obesity
Christine Kao/STAT
There's no such thing as an overnight sensation, right? Not in entertainment and certainly not in science. But the twists and turns in the tale of semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, are dizzying. Lotte Bjerre Knudsen (above), a scientist at Novo Nordisk, has been there from the start (when it was just Novo). She tells her story, for the first time outside Denmark, to STAT's Megan Molteni, from a career that started in a laundry room (really) to the blind alleys of drug development.
Her commitment to wrangling the ephemeral GLP-1 into a more stable molecule that could enter the brain has jump-started a revolution in how doctors think of and treat obesity. Knudsen's passionate belief in harnessing GLP-1 biology withstood halting progress — when its effects seemed only fleeting, when other labs sent up red flags, and when her program hit the trash heap. "I'm actually quite patient," she told Megan. Read (much) more.
reproductive health
MacArthur 'genius' continues her Turnaway research
More than 10 years ago, the Turnaway study turned into a surprise. Diana Greene Foster and her team at the University of California, San Francisco, set out to compare women denied abortions to women who got the procedures. Contrary to widely held beliefs, the women denied abortions fared much worse than those who got them. Foster, best known for that study, recently won a MacArthur "genius" grant of $800,000 that will help fund two related research projects.
The first is a Turnaway study underway in Nepal, a country where abortion laws are less restrictive than they were in the U.S. even before last year's Dobbs decision, but where overall socioeconomic conditions are far worse. The second is research primarily funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and focused on states that restrict abortion, the consequences of the end of Roe v. Wade, and the consequences of abortion being denied for legal reasons. STAT's Annalisa Merelli explains.
research
People with obesity are underrepresented in trials
It's not unusual for obesity to be in the news these days (and in our newsletters), but the clinical trials that underlie biomedical research and regulation rarely include people with obesity, researchers reported this week at the ObesityWeek conference in Dallas. One review of 201 drug approval studies in 2022 found that almost two-thirds did not include weight or BMI-based inclusion/exclusion criteria, and of the 72 studies that did so, three-quarters used the criteria to exclude patients with obesity.
This underrepresentation could leave patients and doctors unaware of how drugs might act in people of different weights. "The FDA needs to issue a mandate of including people with obesity in clinical trials to hold pharmaceutical companies accountable," said Caroline Apovian, co-director of the Center for Weight Management and Wellness at Brigham and Women's Hospital, who led the research. STAT's Anika Nayak has more.
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