Scientist behind Ozempic started her career developing laundry detergent | 60 Minutes

Ozempic and Wegovy may not have been developed if not for the insistence of Novo Nordisk’s head of research, Mads Krogsgaard.

Leadership at the Danish company in the early 1990s were skeptical about developing drugs to treat obesity. Krogsgaard saw things differently. 

“I started trying to convince them that it’s not getting on the bike,” Krogsgaard said. “If you’re genetically predisposed, living in the environment we are in today, you are at very high risk. And something should be done about that.”

Novo Nordisk now makes Ozempic and Wegovy, prescription drugs used to treat Type 2 diabetes and obesity, which have become wildly popular.

From diabetes to laundry detergent to weight loss 

While Krogsgaard  convinced company leadership to study obesity drugs, it was Lotte Knudsen who made breakthroughs in the research. Her first job at Novo Nordisk was on the enzyme team researching ways of making sure reds and whites didn’t run in the wash. She views her research on detergent and obesity the same way. 

“It’s the same story, right, of just wanting to make a product that’s useful,” Knudsen said.

In the early 90s, she came across a study about GLP-1, a naturally occurring gut hormone that lowered blood sugar levels and suppressed appetite. Knudsen thought that if GLP-1 could be harnessed into a drug, it could revolutionize treatment for both diabetes and obesity. She took the study to her boss, head of research Mads Krogsgaard.

“She was the first one to march into my office, with red hair, and very fired up, showing me a publication that was not even published yet,” Krogsgaard said. “She was talking very agitatedly about this. And I was getting excited.”

Novo Nordisk spent the next 20 years working on that GLP-1 molecule before Ozempic finally made it to market as a Type 2 diabetes drug in 2017. It took another four years for Wegovy to be approved for weight loss. 

The drugs turned Novo Nordisk from a niche player into a company bigger than Exxon Mobil and Procter & Gamble. With a market cap of $600 billion, Novo Nordisk is now Europe’s largest company. 

Despite the meteoric success of the drugs she helped develop, Knudsen still considers herself a “nerdy little scientist who kind of found home here in this company for 35 years.”