The gut hormone and the Gila monster
GLP-1
A hormone made in your gut after you eat, which tells your pancreas to release insulin.
- Full name
- Glucagon-like peptide-1
- Made in
- The gut
- Identified
- 1980s
- Job
- Helps release insulin after meals
The story
In the early 1980s, Joel Habener found that the gene for the hormone glucagon also carried the code for a second peptide, which became known as GLP-1. Chemist Svetlana Mojsov then identified the exact active form of the hormone.
There was one big problem: natural GLP-1 breaks down in the body within a couple of minutes.
Help came from an unlikely place. In 1992, John Eng, an endocrinologist in New York, was studying the venom of the Gila monster, a lizard from the American southwest. He found a 39-amino-acid peptide he called exendin-4. It worked like GLP-1 but lasted for hours instead of minutes.
Good to know
Exendin-4 led to exenatide, the first medicine based on GLP-1, approved in the US in 2005. Scientists including Lotte Bjerre Knudsen at Novo Nordisk later engineered longer-lasting versions of human GLP-1. In 2024, Habener, Mojsov and Knudsen received the Lasker Award, often called "America's Nobel", for this work.
In Australia, medicines based on GLP-1 are prescription-only and prescribed by doctors.
Did you know?
Ozempic and Wegovy aren't made from lizard venom. They're built from human GLP-1. The Gila monster's peptide was simply the first proof that the idea could work.