Lotte Bjerre Knudsen: Shivering with Curiosity

Ozempic is one of the most important new medications in a generation. The driving force behind it is the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, which has been invested in GLP-1 research since the early 1990s. The leading scientist in this domain, a self-described "nerd," who grew up on a farm in Denmark and has no interest in the limelight. Lotte Knudsen started her career working on laundry detergent enzymes, but eventually joined a team at the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk that was tasked with looking for new treatments for diabetes. She was convinced that a recently discovered human hormone called GLP-1 could be made into a powerful medication, not only for Type 2 diabetes, but also for weight loss. It took 20 years of hard work and persistence for her and her team to figure it out, but their creation now shows promise as a worthy foe of heart disease, kidney disease, Parkinson's, alcoholism & Alzheimer's as well. In this episode Lotte Knudsen tells her story, and we hear from two of the other scientists who made critical contributions to this revolution in medicine: Mads Thomsen and Daniel Drucker.

You can listen to Lotte Bjerre Knudsen: Shivering with Curiosity online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Lotte Bjerre Knudsen: Shivering with Curiosity is an episode from What It Takes by Academy of Achievement.

This episode is 00:59:20 long.

This episode was published on Jun 29, 2025.

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