Rouse Award: Ellen’s research into weight loss drugs
Ellen (Upper Sixth) investigated weight loss drugs and their importance to solving the obesity epidemic for her Rouse Award-winning project.
Scientifically referred to as GLP-1 receptor agonist weight loss treatments, such medications are better known by brand names such as Wegovy and Ozempic.
However, when Ellen decided to research this topic, Wegovy was only just being launched in the UK, despite such drugs now being headline news, with the government planning a trial of weight loss jabs for unemployed people with obesity in Manchester to see if it can help get them back to work.
She said: “Obesity is hard to treat. Scientists have been trying to find a solution for a very long time with very little success.
“It was quite early days, but I’d read about this weight loss drug on the New Scientist website and I was shocked and impressed because it seemed it actually worked and could make a difference to so many people.
“As I was doing the project, it totally exploded, which I didn’t expect. Everyone knows about Ozempic and Wegovy now, but they didn’t just a year ago. I could follow this as it became commercialised, which was interesting but made it tricky as every day there would be something else on the news.”
Ellen, who hopes to study natural sciences at university, explained that such drugs work by mimicking the gut hormone GLP-1, which is released after eating, leading to a decrease in hunger and appetite suppression.
She said: “It’s clever how they work. They’ve been quite a long time in the making, but it seems like it’s just happened because they’re only just become commercialised, which is why everyone knows about it now.
“In the early days of my project, it was hard because there was so much new material coming through all the time, but I think in the long term it made it more interesting because I wasn’t just trying to look at how they worked, but I could see they were being used.
“It meant I could predict how they would be implemented in real life and it gave me more different angles to look at.
“With the hyper scientific it’s just ‘this is how it works, these are the numbers’, but looking at the news was interesting because you could gauge perception, as well as the social aspect in terms of shortages of the drugs and equity of access to them.”
Although these drugs have attracted controversy over their misuse and consequent side effects by those searching for a quick weight loss fix, Ellen believes they will be a game changer when used in a co-ordinated way to tackle obesity.
She said: “The weight loss they cause is incredible. They do have side effects, mainly related to nausea as they affect your digestion, but when they’re used to treat severe obesity or diabetes rather than cosmetically, it pays off.
“It was interesting to work on something that came to be at the forefront of the news and this is not an issue that’s going to go away.”
Read Ellen’s project in full at our Perse Research website.