unobet Pfizer Stopped Us From Getting Ozempic Decades Ago

2025-01-06 04:25

They called 2023 the year of Ozempic, but it now seems GLP-1 drugs might define an entire decade — or an even longer era. The game-changing drugs, which mimic the hormone GLP-1, offer large benefits for not just diabetes management and especially weight loss but also, apparently, heart and kidney and liver disease, Alzheimer’s and dementia, Parkinson’s and addiction of all kinds. And perhaps because of widespread use of the drugs, the obesity epidemic in America may finally and mercifully be reversing.

But of all the things we learned this year about GLP-1s, the most astonishing could be that the revolution might have started decades earlier. Researchers identified the key breakthrough for GLP-1 drugs nearly 40 years ago, it turns out, long before most Americans had even heard the phrase “obesity epidemic.”

This summer, a former dean of Harvard Medical School, Jeffrey Flier, published a long personal reflection that doubled as an alternate history of what may well be the most spectacular and impactful medical breakthrough of the century so far. In 1987, Flier co-founded a biotech start-up that pursued GLP-1 as a potential treatment for diabetes, not long after it had first been identified by researchers who’d also found that the hormone enhanced insulin secretion in the presence of glucose.

The startup obtained worldwide rights to develop GLP-1 as a metabolic therapy from a group of those researchers, based at Massachusetts General Hospital. They even generated clinical results that suggested it might have promise as a weight-loss drug as well — only to have Pfizer, which had agreed to fund the research, withdraw its support, without providing the researchers with an especially satisfying explanation. Instead, Pfizer told Flier and his partners that the company didn’t believe there would be a market for another injectable diabetes treatment after insulin. Well, Flier tells me, “they were wrong.”

In 1987, nearly seven million Americans had diabetes, and about 40,000 Americans were dying of the disease each year. By 2021, more than 35 million had diabetes, and 100,000 were dying of it each year.

In 1987, fewer than one in five American adults were obese, and by 1999, obesity was responsible for more than 300,000 excess American deaths each year. By 2023, it was more than 40 percent of American adults, and as early as 2016, estimates were already showing as many as 500,000 excess deaths annually as a result.

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Until this yearunobet, only humans, dolphins and parrots were known to use names when communicating. In June, however, scientists reported that African elephants appeared to use names, too; researchers made the discovery by using artificial intelligence-powered software to detect subtle patterns in the elephants’ low-pitched rumbles.