Developing effective new therapies to fight disease requires work to understand why abnormalities happen and how to intervene to stop them. That is what Dr. Daniel J Drucker has successfully done. Dr. Drucker is an endocrinologist and clinician-scientist at Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute in Mount Sinai Hospital and a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Endocrinology, Department of Medicine, at the University of Toronto. He began his career as a physician but transitioned into research to discover new ways of helping people living with diabetes. Innovation is the cornerstone of Dr. Drucker’s career, and his pioneering research has had a global impact on the management of type 2 diabetes, providing treatments to millions of patients worldwide.

When Dr. Drucker first started his lab, he wanted to understand the biology of gut hormones, and their relation to type 2 diabetes. Back then, research in this field was rare. Our gut hormones mediate the digestion, distribution, and absorption of food for growth and metabolism, and Dr. Drucker demonstrated that these processes become disorganized in type 2 diabetes. In particular, he focused on a class of gut hormones called incretins. Incretins, such as GLP-1, are released into our bloodstream in response to nutrients in our gut. They carry out the following crucial activities:

trigger insulin release from the pancreas to lower blood glucose levels,
regulate our appetite, and
control the absorption of nutrients from food and convert them into energy.

Dr. Drucker’s research showed that in individuals living with type 2 diabetes, GLP-1 levels are lower than usual. On top of that, GLP-1 also gets inactivated by another protein (DPP-4) at a higher than normal rate. This dampens GLP-1’s ability to do its job, which causes the high blood glucose levels seen in people living with type 2 diabetes.

This discovery enabled Dr. Drucker to successfully lay the groundwork for the development of two classes of medications to treat type 2 diabetes, by enhancing GLP-1’s activity: GLP-1R agonists and DPP-4 inhibitors. The first drug mimics and enhances the activity of GLP-1 while making them resistant to inactivation by DPP-4. The second drug blocks the actions of DPP-4, taking the break off GLP-1. He has and continues to work closely with pharmaceutical companies to commercialize his discoveries into usable drugs. Amazingly, when patients took these medications, their blood glucose levels decreased to healthier levels. Beyond that, the GLP-1R agonist drug was also shown to lower blood pressure and modify the risk of developing heart attacks and strokes - complications associated with type 2 diabetes.

Dr. Drucker holds over 30 U.S. patents, and some marketed drug products based on his research include Ozempic, Trulicity, and Victoza. Dr. Drucker has also used $2 million of his revenue from licensing his intellectual property to give back to the diabetes research community at the University of Toronto and the University Health Network. His groundbreaking scientific breakthroughs have positioned him as an internationally renowned leader in diabetes research. He has been awarded numerous recognitions for his scientific discoveries, including the triple crown of the most prestigious awards for diabetes research: the American Diabetes Association’s Banting Medal for Scientific Achievement, Japan’s Manpei Suzuki International Prize, and the Claude Bernard Medal from the European Association for the Study of Diabetes. Even more notable, Dr. Drucker was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2015, and recently won the prestigious Baxter Prize for his innovation and entrepreneurship.

— Written by Ayaat Hassan