Lotte Bjerre Knudsen

Lotte Bjerre Knudsen (born March 10, 1964) is a Danish scientist and university professor. She led the development of liraglutide and semaglutide, two notable drugs approved for indications in the treatment of diabetes and obesity.

Early life and education
Knudsen originally studied chemical engineering at the Technical University of Denmark, and obtained a doctorate in scientific medicine (DMSc) from the University of Copenhagen in 2014.

Career
Knudsen began work as a scientist at the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk in Denmark in 1989. As of December 2015, she was being referred to as Scientific Vice President for Global Research at Novo-Nordisk. She served as an adjunct faculty member at Aarhus University from 2015-2020, as a professor in translational medicine.

Since January 2022, Knudsen reports that she is employed as a Chief Scientific Advisor in Research and Early Development at Novo Nordisk.

Contributions
While still a student, Knudsen worked at Novo Nordisk, initially working on laundry detergent enzymes. Alongside fellow student Shamkant Patkar, she discovered an enzyme capable of removing microscopic strands of cotton that pill up on clothing from repeated wear.

After this project, Knudsen joined full-time as part of a research group at Novo Nordisk that aimed to identify new treatments for diabetes, by developing small molecule drugs targeting specific metabolic pathways. One project revolved around glucagon-like peptide-1, a hormone that stimulates the production of insulin but has a short half-life of minutes in the body. Glucagon-like peptide-1 had been previously identified by researchers such as Jens Juul Holst in Denmark, who joined Novo Nordisk as a consultant, and Joel Habener, Daniel J. Drucker, and Svetlana Mojsov at Massachusetts General Hospital. Knudsen's team screened numerous chemical compounds to identify whether they could bind to the glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor sufficiently to stimulate insulin secretion. Eventually, they developed a new compound called liraglutide, which is an agonist for the glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor. It is a chemical analogue of glucagon-like peptide-1, with a fatty acid and spacer attached. These modifications increased its ability to dissolve in water and bind to albumin, which increase its bioavailability—its lifetime in the bloodstream, and so the duration of its action in the body. Liraglutide was approved as a treatment for diabetes under the brand name Victoza in the United States in 2010.

Knudsen's team then worked on what became semaglutide, which had greater stability and affinity to albumin, lengthening its duration of action further to a once-weekly drug. Semaglutide was approved in the United States under the brand name Ozempic as a treatment for type 2 diabetes in 2017, and under the brand name Wegovy, as a first injectable (at 2.4 mg once weekly), for chronic weight management in June 2021.

Impact
Martin Müller and Alexander Preker, writing for Der Spiegel in January 2024, have referred to Knudsen discovery in inventing the semaglutide weight-loss injections as "revolutionary", with the "drug Wegovy... [having] changed the world," and having made Novo Nordisk "Europe's most valuable company, [more valuable] than Daimler, Bayer, Lufthansa and BMW combined".

Honors and recognition
Knudsen received the 2023 Paul Langerhans Medal by the German Diabetes Society for her work developing the GLP-1 receptor agonist (GLP-1 RA) Liraglutide, and in October 2023, she received the STAT Biomedical Innovation award.