Episode Details

Note: This podcast is a companion to the Ground Truths newsletter “A Big Week for GLP-1 Drugs”

Eric Topol (00:06):

It is Eric Topol with Ground Truths, and with me today is Dr. Daniel Drucker from the University of Toronto, who is one of the leading endocrinologists in the world, and he along with Joel Habener and Jens Juul Holst from the University of Copenhagen and Denmark, have been credited with numerous prizes of their discovery work of glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) as we get to know these family of drugs and he's a true pioneer. He's been working on this for decades. So welcome, Daniel.

Daniel Drucker (00:43):

Thank you.

Eric Topol (00:45):

Yeah, it's great to have you and to get the perspective, one of the true pioneers in this field, because to say it's blossom would be an understatement, don't you think?

Daniel Drucker (00:57):

Yeah, it's been a bit of a hectic three years. We had a good quiet 30 plus years of solid science and then it's just exploded over the last few years.

Eric Topol (01:06):

Yeah, back in 30 years ago, did you have any sense that this was coming?

Daniel Drucker (01:14):

Not what we're experiencing today, I think there was a vision for the diabetes story. The first experiments were demonstrating insulin secretion and patents were followed around the use for the treatment of GLP-1 for diabetes. The food intake story was much more gradual and the weight loss story was quite slow. And in fact, as you know, we've had a GLP-1 drug approved for people with obesity since 2014, so it's 10 years since liraglutide was approved, but it didn't really catch the public's attention. The weight loss was good, but it wasn't as spectacular as what we're seeing today. So this really has taken off just over the last three, four years.

Eric Topol (01:58):

Yeah, no, it's actually, I've never seen a drug class like this in my life, Daniel. I mean, I've obviously witnessed the statins, but this one in terms of pleiotropy of having diverse effects, and I want to get to the brain here in just a minute because that seems to be quite a big factor. But one thing just before we get too deep into this, I think you have been great to recognize one of your colleagues who you work with at Harvard, Svetlana Mojsov. And the question I guess is over the years, as you said, there was a real kind of incremental path and I guess was in 1996 when you sai