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Ozempic is being produced for Diabetes 2 and to help control obesity. But apparently it owes its origin to the Gila Monster, or at least some of it.
medicine.uq.edu.au
The rise of Ozempic: how surprise discoveries and lizard venom led to a new class of weight-loss drugs
Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide are taking drugs like Ozempic to lose weight. But what do we actually know about them?
Enter a poisonous lizard
In the 1980s John Pisano, a biochemist with a penchant for venoms, and a young gastroenterologist Jean-Pierre Raufman were working with poisonous lizard venom from the Gila monster, a slow-moving reptile native to the south of the United States and north of Mexico. By the 1990s, Pisano, Raufman and colleague John Eng identified a hormone-like molecule they called exendin-4. This stimulated insulin secretion via action at the same receptor as GLP-1.
Excitingly, exendin-4 was not quickly metabolised by the body, and so might be useful as a diabetic therapeutic.