The SECRET VENOMOUS HISTORY of Ozempic

How a deadly toxin from a desert dwelling lizard led to one of the biggest medical breakthroughs in modern times.

- ANDREW ZALESKI

David Mendosa called it the wall of fat. In 1994, a doctor diagnosed him with type 2 diabetes, and over the next decade, he felt helpless as his weight crept upward until he tipped the scales at 312 pounds. Pastimes he once enjoyed—hikes in the low-lying portions of the Rocky Mountains close to his hometown of Boulder, Colorado—were stymied by the excess girth he carried around his abdomen. This was the wall, and although Mendosa stood at nearly 6 foot 3 inches tall, he was, by all medical definitions, severely obese.

“Moving my big body became much harder,” recounted Mendosa in an article he wrote for the diaTribe Foundation website in 2007. He described using a “grabber” to retrieve the newspaper from his driveway and said that getting out of a chair had become a “chore.”

Mendosa had been managing his diabetes with a cocktail of sulfonylurea and metformin. Taken orally, these medications, respectively, stimulate the pancreas to produce more insulin—the hormone that helps the body’s cells suck in excess glucose in the bloodstream—and help lower the body’s overall level of blood sugar. But the wall of fat remained.

Then, in early 2006, he heard about a brand new drug for type 2 diabetics. Called Byetta, it had been approved by the FDA the previous year. By the time a doctor told Mendosa about it, hundreds of thousands of Americans were taking Byetta. But this was no pill. Rather, Byetta was a twice-daily injection that people administered themselves. And once it entered the body, Byetta went to work slowing digestion. In turn, the body required less pancreatic insulin to flush out excess glucose because the rate at which glucose was entering the blood decreased. What's more, people on the drug were losing weight. That was all Mendosa needed to hear.