Dr. Abud Bakri

This is another animal-derived compound, right?

It's found in the saliva of the Gila monsters.

GLP-1 was discovered.

It's too short-acting to have worked on its own.

Then pharmaceutical companies, this is where you've got to give pharma their credit, they developed these drugs into more functioning versions that had, you know...

longer half-lives and could stick around in the serum for longer to have the clinical effect.

So then we started noticing that diabetics, like my grandma got Bayeta, which was one of these first GLP-1 drugs like 25 years ago.

It was the, out of all the drugs she was on, the reason I went into medicine, that was the drug that changed her whole trajectory because she had less insulin needs and she was losing weight and more energetic.

So we had seen the effects on diabetics and then

You get liraglutide, dulaglutide, and then eventually semaglutide is the blockbuster.

But you get all these positive effects coming from these drugs on diabetics.

It gets translated into obese people and overweight patients.

The question is, what is the long-term effect of this?

Do you have to stay on this drug forever?

Can you tighten it off?

The pharmaceutical companies have not given us good guidelines on that.

They've shown us what happens if you stop a drug.

You can max out on maximum dose of receptide, pull the brakes on.

People tend to sometimes gain the weight.

Some people don't, but some people will regain back to baseline.