Project MUSE - Drug Development Failure: How GLP-1 Development Was Abandoned in 1990

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. Many factors determine whether and when a class of therapeutic agents will be successfully developed and brought to market, and historians of science, entrepreneurs, drug developers, and clinicians should be interested in accounts of both successes and failures. Successes induce many participants and observers to document them, whereas failed efforts are often lost to history, in part because involved parties are typically unmotivated to document their failures. The GLP-1 class of drugs for diabetes and obesity have emerged over the past decade as clinical and financial blockbusters, perhaps soon becoming the highest single source of revenue for the pharmaceutical industry (Berk 2023). In that context, it is instructive to tell the story of the first commercial effort to develop this class of drugs for metabolic disease, and how, despite remarkable early

saved by

• Brandon Wang
• Ishan Mukherjee