Who invented semaglutide? A small team at Novo Nordisk in Denmark, not a lone inventor. Chemists Jesper Lau and Thomas Kruse led the design work alongside laboratory technician Paw Bloch, and those three are the named inventors on the U.S. patent. Lotte Bjerre Knudsen, who had already helped create the company's once-daily drug liraglutide, led the biology research behind both medicines. Their molecule became Ozempic in 2017 and Wegovy in 2021.
The hormone it copies was found years earlier by academic scientists; that story is in who discovered GLP-1. This page is about the people who made a version of it last a week.
The problem: a hormone that vanishes in minutes
GLP-1 is a gut hormone released after meals. It prompts the pancreas to release insulin and helps signal fullness. As a medicine, it had one glaring flaw.
Given into a vein, natural GLP-1 has a half-life (the time it takes the body to clear half of it) of about a minute and a half (Knudsen and Lau, Frontiers in Endocrinology 2019). An enzyme called DPP-4 snips it apart, and the kidneys filter out what's left.
In the 1990s, Knudsen's group found a workable fix: attach a fatty acid so GLP-1 clings to albumin, the most common protein in blood, which hides it from the kidneys and lets it go slowly. Their 2000 paper described versions lasting long enough for one shot a day (Knudsen et al., J Med Chem 2000). That work became liraglutide, approved in the U.S. as Victoza in 2010 and compared with semaglutide in liraglutide vs semaglutide.
The next goal was one shot a week.
Who invented semaglutide: the chemists and their brief
In Novo Nordisk's own account, Thomas Kruse was an organic chemist making small-molecule drugs when he was asked, in spring 2002, to switch to peptides (short chains of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins). Jesper Lau, another chemist, had joined him by late that year, with Paw Bloch working alongside them. Their brief was a GLP-1 medicine that lasted a week (Novo Nordisk Annual Report 2025).
The hard part was a balancing act. A fatty tail that grips albumin too tightly keeps the drug from reaching its receptor, the switch on cells that GLP-1 flips. Too loose, and the drug clears too fast. So the team tested fatty acids of different lengths and different linkers, the chemical bridge between tail and peptide.
The answer was three changes to human GLP-1. One swapped the amino acid at position 8 for a look-alike called Aib, which DPP-4 can't cut. A second swapped lysine for arginine at position 34, a change carried over from liraglutide. The third hung an 18-carbon fatty acid on position 26 through a longer, water-friendly linker. The 2015 discovery paper calls the fatty acid and linker the key features and names semaglutide the best once-weekly candidate (Lau et al., J Med Chem 2015). Novo Nordisk says it was compound number 217.
In people, the current Ozempic label (revised May 2026) gives semaglutide a half-life of about one week (DailyMed). How semaglutide works covers what it does at the receptor.
The semaglutide inventors on paper
Two public documents name the people, and they name different groups, which is normal for science done inside a company.
The patent, U.S. 8,129,343, "Acylated GLP-1 compounds," lists three inventors: Jesper Lau, Paw Bloch and Thomas Kruse Hansen, the name Kruse carries on the filing. It traces back to a first filing on March 18, 2005, and was granted on March 6, 2012 (Google Patents).
The 2015 discovery paper in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry has 17 authors, all at Novo Nordisk, with Lau first, Kruse last and Knudsen among them. When it came out, semaglutide was already in phase 3, the large trials run before a drug is submitted for approval.
Lau put the credit question plainly in the company's account: "Successful drug development is always a team effort." The Lasker Foundation's write-up describes the effort as "led by chemists Jesper Lau and Thomas Kruse" (Lasker Foundation).
Lotte Bjerre Knudsen's role
Knudsen has worked at Novo Nordisk since 1989. Her University of Oxford profile describes her as a co-inventor of liraglutide who "has led all biology research programs for liraglutide and semaglutide" (Radcliffe Department of Medicine). She has been the company's Chief Scientific Advisor since 2022.
The fair short answer: Knudsen set the albumin strategy and led the biology; Lau, Kruse and Bloch designed the once-weekly molecule inside that program.
History of semaglutide, from lab to pharmacy
The first big test in people, published in 2016, was a 12-week trial of 415 adults with type 2 diabetes. Higher doses lowered blood sugar and weight more but brought more nausea and vomiting, which eased when the dose was raised in steps. So the authors chose a four-week step-up for the phase 3 trials that followed (Nauck et al., Diabetes Care 2016).
| Date | Milestone |
|---|---|
| December 5, 2017 | Ozempic injection, for type 2 diabetes |
| September 20, 2019 | Rybelsus, the first semaglutide tablet |
| June 4, 2021 | Wegovy injection, for chronic weight management |
| December 22, 2025 | Wegovy tablet |
Each date is the one signed on the original approval letter for Ozempic, Rybelsus, Wegovy injection and the Wegovy tablet.
The tablet needed another team. A Novo Nordisk group led by Stephen Buckley, with Knudsen as senior author, showed that semaglutide paired with an absorption helper called SNAC is taken up through the stomach wall (Buckley et al., Sci Transl Med 2018). Oral semaglutide explains how the pill works.
Prizes for the semaglutide team
- 2024: the Intellectual Property Owners Education Foundation named Bloch, Kruse Hansen and Lau Inventors of the Year, jointly with the Eli Lilly team behind Mounjaro (IPOEF).
- 2024: Knudsen shared the Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for GLP-1 medicines.
- April 5, 2025: Knudsen was one of five scientists given the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for GLP-1 work (Breakthrough Prize).
- March 9, 2026: the University of Edinburgh awarded Knudsen, Kruse and Lau its Cameron Prize for Therapeutics, a prize first given in 1879 (University of Edinburgh).
Where semaglutide stands today
As of September 22, 2026, the day this article was written, the FDA's Orange Book lists December 5, 2031, as the U.S. expiry of the Lau, Bloch and Kruse Hansen patent on Ozempic (FDA Orange Book). The Orange Book is the FDA's list of approved drugs and their patents.
Outside the United States, other companies have started making the molecule. Health Canada's drug database lists Sevmia, a semaglutide pen made by Apotex rather than Novo Nordisk, as approved on June 29, 2026 (Health Canada). That approval covers Canada only.
The idea outlived the molecule
The albumin trick spread beyond Novo Nordisk. Tirzepatide, the once-weekly medicine Eli Lilly sells as Mounjaro and Zepbound, is a different molecule that acts on two gut-hormone receptors instead of one. Lilly's 2018 discovery paper calls it "a fatty acid modified peptide" designed for once-weekly dosing (Coskun et al., Mol Metab 2018). Its current label (revised August 2026) says it carries a 20-carbon fatty acid that enables albumin binding and prolongs the half-life (DailyMed).
What the invention did not settle
The chemistry solved a timing problem. It didn't settle who should take the drug, how one person will respond, or how they'll handle the stomach side effects the first trial flagged. Those stay questions for a clinician and a patient.
It also says nothing about a particular vial. What is in a vial depends on who made it and how it was checked, which is why a named prescriber and a licensed U.S. pharmacy that documents what it dispenses matter more than the molecule's pedigree.
Through Promise, semaglutide is dispensed as a compounded medication, which is different from an FDA-approved product: the formulation offered here is not FDA-approved. A licensed provider may still prescribe a compounded formulation; that decision is between you and your doctor. At Promise, a licensed provider reviews every request, and not everyone qualifies.