How GLP-1 Went From Biology to Blockbuster

How did a gut hormone that disappeared in seconds become one of the biggest drug classes in the world?In this episode, I walk through the story of GLP-1, from early scientific discovery and the Gila monster breakthrough to Novo Nordisk’s drug design strategy, Eli Lilly’s competitive push, and the shift that turned GLP-1 from a diabetes treatment into something much bigger.This is a story about how a hard biological problem became a pharmaceutical platform, and how that platform began to change the way medicine thinks about obesity, metabolism, and chronic disease.Timestamps00:08 Intro: The 90-Second Hormone02:23 The Gut’s Hidden Signal05:01 The Discovery of GLP-110:32 The Gila Monster Breakthrough16:04 Novo Solves the Delivery Problem19:43 How GLP-1 Became a Platform25:46 Beyond Diabetes30:28 Lilly Raises the Benchmark32:43 The Broader Implications of GLP-143:22 The future of GLP-149:14 When the Science Meets the System