DeMarkey had spent the interview arguing the opposite case — that the chemistry behind GLP-1 drugs gets underplayed next to the biology, and that the drug is a chemical entity somebody has to synthesise. Then, on a podcast made by the American Chemical Society, he conceded the larger point to biology and named the reaction he gets for it. He backed it with forty years of biotechnology, from HIV detection to targeted cancer antibodies.
I mean, we are achieving outcomes that rival what would require surgical intervention, gastric bypass surgeries. And the reason why I agreed to do this podcast is because I often fear that in these spectacular biological outcomes, the focus on the medicine, that the chemical contribution is deemphasized. And yet that is the drug. It is a chemical entity, it has to be synthesized, it has to be analyzed, it has to be formulated, and this progression to higher purity, lesser cost, integrated mechanisms of action, extended durations of action are very much driven by people who carry ACS membership cards that are part of this spectacular, quite frankly, molecular miracle that we are witnessing.
So before we end the interview, I feel like I need to at least mention that beyond diabetes and weight loss, these drugs seem to be having some unexpected positive off-target effects, including reducing addiction to drugs like opioids and nicotine, but also possibly gambling. How do you think about that?
You know, Carl Jurassic, the father of the pill, shared with me early in my uh career that there are rare times when the discovery of a drug has a societal impact that exceeds its intended medicinal purpose, right? Contraception wasn't just about fertility. It was part of the women's liberation movement, right? It gave us control of fertility that was of utmost importance for the societal change that we witness. I believe that the way these drugs are presenting uh has that quality to it, right? It has a psychological impact that is beyond just controlling your body weight, has an emotional impact. We weren't expecting these effects on addiction, uh depression. Where is this going to lead us? Quite frankly, we don't know, but that's the exciting part. That's what keeps me coming back to the laboratory each day. This is the century of biology, and my chemical colleagues are frustrated when I say that. But look at the last 40 years in biotechnology in terms of what we've been able to do, obesity being just one of them, from HIV, its detection, its treatment, COVID, antibodies to treat inflammatory diseases, targeted antibodies for cancer, immunotherapy. It's like night and day. Now tell me, where are we going to be 40 years from now?
I feel like that's a great question. So I actually did an episode about GLP1s on tiny matters a while back, but I'd forgotten how little we still understand about why the newer GLP ones achieved such higher performance than the early ones.
Yeah. And it was a long process.
It was.