The Lasker Awards, announced today, are among the most prestigious prizes in biomedicine and basic biology. The winners, which include dozens who have gone on to win a Nobel Prize, have usually been feted in their fields—and often beyond—long before being selected.
One of this year’s awardees, however, was largely unknown until a year ago. Svetlana Mojsov, a chemist at Rockefeller University, will share the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award with chemist Lotte Bjerre Knudsen at Novo Nordisk and endocrinologist Joel Habener at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) “for the discovery and development of GLP-1 [glucagon-like peptide-1] drugs that have revolutionized the treatment of obesity,” the Lasker Foundation announced.
Medicines targeting the cellular receptor GLP-1 have had unprecedented success in weight loss and raked in billions of dollars, especially for Novo Nordisk, which pioneered the bestseller Ozempic. (Science named the research its 2023 Breakthrough of the Year.) The three winners all played crucial roles in deciphering GLP-1 biology and, in Knudsen’s case, helping convert such knowledge into drugs.
For Mojsov, who published key papers on the receptor while at MGH in the 1980s, the prize caps a mind-bending change of fortune. She was initially left off important GLP-1-related patents and later fought, successfully, to be added. Her early research largely faded into obscurity until some press outlets, including Science, highlighted her story last fall. The Lasker is the latest in a series of research prizes she has received since then. (All the Lasker winners can be seen here.)
Over lunch recently at the Morgan Library in New York City, Mojsov shared her thoughts on credit and competition in science, the future of GLP-1 drugs, and how media coverage revealed her story to her adult daughter. The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: How did you find out you’d won the Lasker?
A: I was with my husband Michel [Nussenzweig, an immunologist at Rockefeller]. We had spent 5 days in the Tetons and we were coming back to New York. It was a Monday in June, we were on the flight. I was just checking my email because I wanted to text my children that we are on the plane, coming back. I see an email from Joe Goldstein [a Nobel laureate and chair of the Lasker Medical Research Awards]. Fortunately, the plane was delayed so I had enough time to respond to him, because it sayid, “Please acknowledge receipt.”
Q: You’ve had this unusual experience of being absent from the history of a field and then rejoining that story. What has that been like?
A: First of all, I’m glad that I’m rejoining the story because I was there at the very beginning. My first experience of getting an award was the VinFuture Award in Vietnam. That was in December of 2023. I was told by various members of the jury that they saw your article in Science, found my papers, and then asked all the members of the jury to read them. Something I find really touching is how everybody was so supportive, the entire jury. And I was added without any nomination. I was not nominated. I think this whole thing is not anymore about me, but about how the credit is being allocated.
Q: And that has much bigger implications across science.
A: There is this old-fashioned belief that the senior scientists contribute to the knowledge and the junior scientists are there to help. Science is a collaboration, we all contribute. But younger scientists, junior scientists, should get the credit where the credit is due. And I really hope that my case, my example, will bring that out. I hope that people will start considering the junior people, asking, “What was their contribution?”
I think if I were to change anything, I wouldn’t go by nominations alone [for award selection]. And even if there is a nomination, go to the published record, read the papers.
Q: What was it like for you putting your story out there?
A: For me it’s very difficult to talk about myself. But I just poured myself out. I’ve been thinking about that in the past year, because this is not in my personality. I have to say, I surprised myself. I’m surprised how much I told you, I really am. I must have felt so frustrated and so hurt. It was all these feelings which even I was not aware of.
Q: Years ago, in a docudrama I watched about the discovery of insulin, the actor playing Frederick Banting says, “There will be enough glory for all of us if we can get it right.” I thought about that line with this GLP-1 story, 100 years later. The issue of scientific credit can create such rifts in a field.
A: Yes, yes. It’s very difficult. It just tears people apart. Sometimes individual people do have main insights, and that should be recognized. But also with all this collaboration, I think everybody should be recognized. Important discoveries are always beautiful stuff, it’s always a triumph of science. That’s what we should be celebrating.
Q: We’re seeing an explosion of interest in GLP-1 drugs for the prevention of heart disease, maybe Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, drug addiction. What are the burning questions for you and where can you see the field going?
A: There are two things. First, to really to understand how GLP-1 works in the brain, how it regulates not only obesity but all these other diseases. There’s some thinking that maybe it can [regulate] inflammation—how? I think it’s a good area to go into.
The second is that we can think how to develop better chemistry to make GLP-1 drugs more efficiently, so they will be a lot less expensive. I think one reason why there is a short supply is because they are difficult to make. I think a lot of companies are working on that.
Liraglutide is already off [patent], Ozempic is going to go off—and that will give freedom to chemists to explore alternatives.
Q: I think it was [your graduate school friend] George Barany who said to me that your daughter hadn’t known this story about your role in GLP-1 research?
A: She didn’t know about all that struggle I had with the patents. She was upset with me, she said, “Why did you never tell me?” I think it’s given her strength now. If she thinks that some things in her own professional experience are not correct or not fair—she actually sees that it can happen—she has to stand up for herself.
More: https://www.science.org/content/article/lasker-awardee-svetlana-mojsov-journey-out-obscurity
