Jens Juul Holst

speaker

287 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 4 May

Jens Juul Holst’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Discovery · The Life Scientific: Jens Juul Holst · 4 May 2026 podcast

And it turned out, no, no, we couldn't because the higher the doses we gave them, the more side effects there would be.

There would be nausea and eventually vomiting.

But we found out that you could stabilize the molecule by exchanging really a single amino acid in the chain.

And that could make it resistant towards this enzyme.

But it would still be eliminated quickly from the kidneys.

And that would be a problem.

So something special had to be done to circumvent that problem.

And that's what they did at Novo Nordisk, where they attached a fatty acid chain to the molecule.

And what happens is that when you inject that, it will bind to one of the proteins in the plasma in the blood.

And it has a long half-life of 20 days or something like that.

So all of a sudden, this peptide, GLP-1, can now survive in the body.

And it turned out that the half-life of this fatty acid substitute, GLP-1, was now 12 hours.

rather than two minutes.

So that was quite a difference, right?

So that is the ractotype that was developed at the Novo Nordisk company.

So the people at Novo Nordisk created some dose response studies and could demonstrate that if they were very careful with the increasing dosing in the beginning,

you could actually get to higher doses, which would give a weight loss of some 7 to 8 percent.

And this was the procedure that eventually led to Saxenda, which was the first of these drugs to be approved for obesity therapy.

What happened was that several pharmaceutical companies were now interested in this and tried to extend the half-life by changing a few other details of the molecule – not very much, by the way – and managed to produce a molecule that could last for a week.

requiring only weekly injections.

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