BIO
Jens Juul Holst (Copenhagen, Denmark, 1945) received an MSc in Medical Sciences from the University of Copenhagen, where he went on to earn a PhD in the same subject in 1978. Professor of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen since 1996, he also spent ten years (2010-2020) as Scientific Director of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research – based at the same university – where he is currently a Senior Group Leader. He heads the research cluster on Endocrinology and Metabolism in the Faculty of Health Sciences and from 1995 to 2002 was Vice-Chairman of the Biotechnology Center for Signal Peptides. He is co-founder of the startups Antag Therapeutics and Bainan Biotech and author of over 2,000 publications, almost 1700 of them in PubMed. A former visiting professor at Guangdong Pharmaceutical University (China), he currently gives more than 30 presentations a year across the Americas, Asia and Europe.
CONTRIBUTION
From his experience as a surgeon, Jens Juul Holst knew that the blood sugar levels of some patients could fall dangerously low after their time in the operating theater. It seemed clear that the reason for this was the gut overstimulating insulin production, but the question remained as to what was triggering the process.
In the early 1980s, independently of his colleagues in Massachusetts, Holst and his team discovered that GLP-1 stimulated insulin release in the pancreas. They also observed that GLP-1 inhibited production of glucagon, a hormone secreted by the pancreas that increases levels of sugar in the blood. It was this second property that drew their attention, as it was precisely the effect sought in type 2 diabetes patients, and they immediately got to work on exploring its potential as a therapeutic agent.
The success of the drug was tangible from the first studies, and a large-scale clinical trial in 2002 paved the way for the approval, in 2005, of the first GLP-1 drug for the treatment of type 2 diabetes. Holst also showed the satiating effect of GLP-1 in human subjects, and in 2014 the first anti-obesity drug based on the peptide was approved.
The benefits of GLP-1 to treat both type 2 diabetes and obesity are game-changing, reducing the risk of common side effects as well as of complications associated to both conditions.
