The rockefeller university

Research Associate Professor Svetlana Mojsov has been named a recipient of the Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Biology and Biomedicine from the BBVA Foundation, based in Spain. She shares the award with three other scientists who together laid the groundwork for a new generation of drugs used to treat type 2 diabetes and obesity, including Ozempic and Wegovy: Daniel Drucker of Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Joel Habener of Harvard University, and Jens Juul Holst of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

Mojsov trained as a Ph.D. student at Rockefeller in the 1970s, working the lab of biochemistry professor R. Bruce Merrifield, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing solid-phase peptide synthesis. After graduating, Mojsov stayed in Merrifield’s lab as a postdoc and research associate, continuing the research she had started as a student and eventually achieving what few in her field thought possible: the complete synthesis of glucagon, a peptide hormone that increases blood-glucose release from the liver, protecting against low blood glucose.

As an independent investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital in the 1980s, Mojsov applied her expertise in the chemical synthesis of peptides in numerous lines of research, including studies which led to her discovery of glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1), a peptide of unknown function. Collaborating with Joel Habener, an endocrinologist at MGH, she showed that GLP-1 is a hormone released by the gut in response to food, producing glucose-dependent insulin secretion by the pancreas.

This research was fundamental to the eventual development of medications that increase GLP-1 production to safely treat diabetes, however the further development of long-lived versions of GLP-1 were discovered to produce dramatic weight loss—and also lowered the risk of diabetic and obesity-related complications including heart attacks and kidney disease. Treatments based on the GLP-1 hormone have also proved effective in treating sleep apnea and have the potential to treat obesity-related liver disease and cancer, as well as potential in Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and addiction disorders.

Mojsov is the second Rockefeller recipient of a BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge of Award in the 17 years it has been given; Jeff Friedman received it in 2012. Mojsov has received several other recent awards in the past year, including the Lasker Award, the Tang Prize, the Warren Triennial Prize, the Princess of Asturias Award, and the 2024 Pearl Meister Greengard Prize.