Lotte Bjerre Knudsen DMSc, PhD

Lotte Bjerre Knudsen is an Honorary Professor in Translational Medicine at Aarhus University, Denmark. She holds a degree in biotechnology from the Technical University and a Doctoral Degree in Scientific Medicine from the University of Copenhagen, both in Denmark. Lotte Bjerre Knudsen is a former employee of Novo Nordisk (1989-2026); she was the Chief Scientific Advisor for Research & Development at Novo Nordisk. Lotte has deep experience in drug discovery and development. Her work has evolved much around GLP-1-based medicines, and she has been involved from early ideation back in the 1990s, where she led the first program on a long-acting GLP-1 medicine, to recent work detailing mechanisms for these medicines in rodents and people with disease.

She has been part of representing Novo Nordisk in five FDA Advisory committees. Lotte has received numerous awards for her work on GLP-1 medicines. Most recently, she was the recipient of the 2023 Paul Langerhans Award from the German Diabetes Association, the 2024 Science and American Association for Advancement of Science Mani L. Bhaumik Breakthrough of the Year Award (with Richard DiMarchi), the 2024 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award (with Joel Habener and Svetlana Mojsov), and the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (with Daniel Drucker, Joel Habener, Jens Juul Holst, and Svetlana Mojsov). She has received Lifetime Achievement Awards from Novo Nordisk, the Danish Biotech Association, and, most recently, Stanford University. She has published extensively throughout her career, with many papers around mechanisms for GLP-1-based medicines in diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular, kidney, and liver disease. Her interests also include important methodology in drug target expression, drug discovery in general, and the use of AI in drug discovery. In summary, Lotte Bjerre Knudsen’s contributions exemplify successful translational research, bridging basic discovery to transformative therapies for metabolic and related diseases.