- Novo Nordisk scientist Lotte Bjerre Knudsen paved the way for popular GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic.
- Her work in the 1990s was instrumental in turning short-acting hormones into long-acting drugs.
- Her 'product mindset' is what keeps her going, she said.
Inventor and scientist Lotte Bjerre Knudsen has spent her entire career at Novo Nordisk.
"I started here fresh out of university," she told Business Insider from the company's glass-walled headquarters outside Copenhagen. She's sitting just across the road from where her career began in the late 1980s, developing color-safe laundry detergent.
It would have been impossible to predict then that she'd become instrumental in the development of the popular class of injectable diabetes and weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy that have become a roughly $47 billion global market.
It was her research and development of Novo Nordisk's first daily GLP-1 shot for diabetes (liraglutide, approved in the US in 2010) that would spur the development of those more powerful, longer-lasting weekly shots, which she also oversaw.
For years, scientists had known that the GLP-1 hormone played a key role in regulating appetite. But these hormones were so fleeting in the body, almost nobody in the diabetes world was convinced they'd make a successful drug. As Novo Nordisk tells the story now, the company was less than a year out from closing down the entire GLP-1 program when she had her breakthrough.
Today she's proudly wearing her new Lasker Prize lapel pin, as a 2024 recipient of the science award widely seen as second only to a Nobel Prize. It's in recognition of the pivotal role she played in developing the first long-acting GLP-1 drugs.
Here are the three key guideposts she said have helped her succeed with business breakthroughs for 35 years.
Develop a 'product mindset'
Knudsen's cardinal goal, she says, has always been to develop products that "help people at an everyday level" — a tenet she's held onto from her early days experimenting with laundry detergent.
"I've only ever had one job," she said.
She calls it a "product mindset," or "enterprise mindset" and says she learned it first from her dad. It's a type of energy, a way of being driven to solve problems, to make something that will be useful.
"It's the same mindset I have used in everything I've ever done, to just say, 'actually I want to help, make a product that can help' — either in society, or people with disease," she said. "That mindset is exactly the same whether you are making laundry detergents, which certainly help people, or you are making medicines to help people in a very different way, but still help people at an everyday level."
She's clear-headed about the fact that the approach only sometimes ends with success, but is not deterred by the failures, she says. Instead, they press her on to find new ways to solve the problems that pop up.
"I'm okay with being challenged, I don't mind," she said. "But it doesn't make me give up. I listen to the critique, or the feedback, and then I go think about whether there's something I should be doing differently."
Focus on what you know
Knudsen says her training at "Denmark's MIT" (actually called the Technical University of Denmark, or DTU) helped her chart a path toward a drug development solution rooted in biotechnology. Specifically, she focused her research on injectable peptides. This wasn't because she thought peptides were superior to pills. It was what she knew best.
"I think there's some kind of synergy between the background that I had and the problem that needed to be solved," she said. "I was very comfortable with peptides as a potential medicine."
To make the GLP-1 hormone "long-acting" her team found a way to attach a fatty acid to the molecule. She compares this structure to a steak — it's a one-two punch of protein and fat, protecting the hormone-mimicking shot from rapid degradation in the body.
Stay humble and curious
Even though Knudsen and her teams at Novo Nordisk invented an entirely new class of diabetes and weight loss drugs, she's still level-headed about these relatively new medicines.
She says more scientific studies of the drugs are essential to better untangle how they work, and reveal all the different aspects of our health they impact, from inflammation and addiction to dementia.
While she acknowledges there are serious concerns about muscle loss in many people taking GLP-1s, she says drug developers should exercise caution in combining GLP-1s with other medications, like those designed to help combat muscle loss.
"You can't start combining left, right, north, east, west unless you really understand what the foundational part of the biology means," she said.
Now a chief science officer at Novo Nordisk, her executive role is far more focused on mentorship and governance than technical knowledge. But she still aims to explore the basic science that can steer new discoveries. In 2021, she took a job rotation at Novo Nordisk's research site inside Oxford University to learn more about genetics, hormones, and machine learning.
"There's all these things that need to happen in the body after you've eaten," Knudsen said. "GLP-1 is involved in that, and that's why it has both effects on different organs, and the brain, and everything that needs to happen after you eat."