One of the biopharma industry’s marvels of the 2020s has been the enormous medical and financial success of the GLP-1 class of drugs. But the path to commercialization of these therapies was far more complex than most understand, and some of the earliest history has never been presented.
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Beginning in 1988, I was part of what I believe was the earliest commercial effort to develop GLP-1 as a metabolic therapy. Despite extremely promising results, Pfizer, the major funder of the work in alliance with California Biotechnology, abandoned the effort around 1991 after mistakenly concluding that the GLP-1 therapeutic approach was not worth continuing. To be clear, I’m not writing this to claim credit for discovery or development of GLP-1s or anything like that. Rather, I think the story offers valuable lessons on drug development for pharmaceutical companies, researchers, and the general public alike.
