Svetlana Mojsov wins the 2024 Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award

Svetlana Mojsov has been named a 2024 recipient of the Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, generally regarded as America’s top prize in biomedical research.

Her discovery of GLP-1 and its critical role in the regulation of insulin secretion and blood glucose led to the development of a revolutionary new class of medicines for type 2 diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease. The Lasker Foundation is honoring Mojsov together with two other scientists—Joel F. Habener at Massachusetts General Hospital and Lotte Bjerre Knudsen at Novo Nordisk—for this groundbreaking work. They will receive the award during a ceremony taking place in New York City on September 27.

Mojsov is the 26th Rockefeller scientist to win a Lasker since the awards were established in 1945. More than one-third of these previous Lasker laureates—including R. Bruce Merrifield, in whose lab Mojsov trained as a graduate student and postdoc and continued to work as a research associate, went on to win a Nobel Prize. It was after Mojsov left Merrifield’s lab and moved to Boston that she discovered GLP-1 and characterized its biological function. At the time, in the 1980s, she served as director of Massachusetts General Hospital’s peptide synthesis facility and an instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Using solid-phase peptide synthesis—a powerful technique pioneered by Merrifield that Mojsov became a leading expert in—she was able to synthesize the GLP-1 peptide in sufficient amounts to generate antibodies against it. With these antibodies, she and her colleagues were able to demonstrate that the hormone is made in the gut and travels to the pancreas, the site of insulin secretion.

In a series of animal experiments and a clinical study, Mojsov and her collaborators subsequently demonstrated that the GLP-1 peptide increases insulin production when administered by injection, causing blood glucose levels to drop. Drug companies leveraged these insights to develop several diabetes treatments leading to the now-famous drugs Ozempic, the first GLP-1 agonist taken by weekly injections, and Wegovy, which contains a higher dose of Ozempic’s active ingredient.

Wegovy produced remarkable results in clinical trials: It didn’t just lower patients’ blood glucose as researchers had expected, but also led to significant weight loss in those who were overweight or obese. Moreover, the drug was shown to lower the risk of many comorbidities of diabetes such as heart attack, stroke, and kidney failure.

Today, scientists around the world are studying other potential effects of GLP-1 based therapeutics, with early results suggesting they may have promise in preventing kidney cancer and kidney failure resulting from fatty liver disease.

Earlier this year, Mojsov received several other awards recognizing her critical role in the initiation of this revolution, including the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize, the Tang Prize in Biopharmaceutical Science, and the Princess of Asturias Award for Technical & Scientific Research. She shared the latter prize with Jeff Friedman, Rockefeller’s Marilyn M. Simpson Professor, who discovered leptin, the first hormone regulating body weight. Mojsov was also named the recipient of the 2025 Warren Triennial Prize and included on the TIME100 list of Most Influential People of 2024.