The Science That Turned Lizard Venom Into GLP-1s Is Under Attack

Dr. Coller directs the RNA Innovation Center at Johns Hopkins University.

A slow, heavy desert lizard called the Gila monster can go months between meals. In the early 1990s, a physician-scientist named John Eng grew curious about how it keeps its blood sugar steady across those long fasts. Working with modest funds at a Veterans Affairs hospital, he and a colleague studied the lizard’s venom and isolated a molecule that behaved like a human gut hormone, except that it lasted for hours instead of minutes.

Years later, a synthetic version of that molecule became the first of the GLP-1........

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