This chemical engineer has generated roughly $110 billion in revenue, by pushing an idea people didn’t believe. Her name is Lotte Bjerre Knudsen.
Most of the world still doesn’t know her, but you do know the products Wegovy and Ozempic, produced by Novo Nordisk, by now.
When Lotte joined Novo Nordisk 30+ years ago, to everyone else in the field, GLP-1 was a diabetes hormone. Full stop. That’s what it had been discovered as, a gut hormone that tells the pancreas to release insulin, and that’s what the research money was for.
Weight loss only showed up in the data as a side effect. A small footnote in the presentation. And inside the pharma industry, diabetes and obesity were two separate worlds. But Lotte looked at the same molecule and saw something no one else was looking for.
She pushed to pursue obesity as a target in its own right with GLP-1 more than two decades ago, but no one believed in it. In her words: “It was a lonely time for me, because not a lot of people were interested in talking to me about my weird obsession with this.”
Yet, she kept pushing.
It took until 2014 before the first GLP-1 was approved for weight management. And until 2021 before Wegovy made the entire world understand what she had been saying for two decades.
Fast forward, through numerous promotions and award wins: In 2025, the semaglutide molecule accounted for 70%+ of everything Novo Nordisk sold. And semaglutide revenue from 2020 to 2025 was roughly $110 billion.
I’d say she proved her point.
Image: Carsten Snejbjerg.
