BIO
Daniel Joshua Drucker (Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 1956) completed his MD at the University of Toronto in 1980. After working at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, in 1987 he took up simultaneous appointments at the University of Toronto and Toronto General Hospital, combining teaching and research as he continues to do today. Currently a University Professor at the University of Toronto and Senior Scientist at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital in the same city, he has participated in more than 60 peer-reviewed research projects and serves on the editorial bards of the Journal of the Endocrine Society, Molecular Metabolism and Cell Metabolism, and as Consulting Editor of Diabetes. Drucker is the holder or co-holder of some thirty patents in the United States alone, and has authored more than 300 publications in scientific journals.
CONTRIBUTION
In the 1980s, a group of scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital set out to explore the potential of some newly discovered hormones, including the GLP-1 peptide. Joel Habener succeeded in cloning the gene that coded for these hormones, while Svetlana Mojsov managed to identify GLP-1 and show that it stimulated insulin production in the pancreas of rats.
Daniel Drucker, then a posdoctoral fellow in the same hospital, was striving to get a more precise handle on the function of GLP-1. After multiple experiments, he finally deduced that insulin production only occurred in very short forms of the peptide, and only when blood sugar levels were high. In 1996, Drucker found that GLP-1 also suppressed appetite in animals, leading them to shed weight.
Since then, GLP-1 has marked a game-changing advance in the treatment of both type 2 diabetes and obesity. Various diabetes treatments were already in use, but this new generation based on GLP-1 dramatically reduces the risk of blood sugar levels dropping below the safe limit. In addition, disease prognosis improves considerably thanks to weight loss also associated to GLP-1, and these new medications have recently been observed to reduce the risk of other complications of type 2 diabetes, including blindness, kidney disease and heart attacks.
On the obesity score, the 15% to 20% reductions in body mass that have been achieved are unprecedented and, as with diabetes, GLP-1 drugs also reduce obesity-related risks, among them cardiovascular disease.
