Andrea Trena

As soon as you ingest food, your body is going to start secreting GLP-1 because it immediately triggers that, oh, you've ingested some food.

And so it's going to tell your brain you're eating.

And so it's going to make sure it triggers that effect so that you start to feel full.

but it's a very short acting and only lasts a couple of minutes.

We took out a couple of amino acids and exchanged them for other ones so that the molecule can't immediately be degraded by the enzyme that our body naturally makes to break it down.

And then the second thing we did is we added a big fatty acid chain to the end of it so that it binds to protein and hangs out in the body for longer.

So semaglutide actually has a half-life of a week instead of just two minutes.

Our body is trained to release enzymes and to attack those proteins almost immediately to break them down into smaller pieces so that they can be absorbed.

So for 100 years, we've been trying to make a protein, a peptide-based molecule, able to be absorbed orally.

It is a very long chemical name, but it is abbreviated as SNAC.

S-N-A-C.

Adorable.

Isn't that cute?

Thank goodness.

No pun intended, but it is just the first letter from each of the chemicals within the structure, and it just worked out to be SNAC, and I love that.

When you swallow that tablet, it creates a tiny little microenvironment at the base of the stomach right where that tablet sits.

And so it's kind of, if you think about dropping an Alka-Seltzer tablet in a glass of water, that immediate fizzy reaction that occurs, that is what happens in your stomach as soon as this tablet hits the base of your stomach, hits that stomach wall.

It creates this little foamy environment directly around the tablet.