Nadeem Sarwar and his team must analyze huge amounts of data to understand what causes people to be overweight. Photo: Stuart Nicol
The 43-Year-Old has dedicated his career to studying how data can be used to predict disease and create more effective medicines. He has held positions at Pfizer and research giant Eisai, and last year was appointed co-chair of the UK government's dementia mission.
At Novo Nordisk, he and his team analyze huge amounts of data to understand what causes people excess weight. The reasons can be very different.
“An 18-year-old woman who has gained weight because she was trying to quit smoking has a fundamentally different biology and psychology than, say, a 55-year-old woman. going through perimenopause,” says Sarwar.
“We need to understand what drives the disease in this person compared to that person.”
Novo Nordisk is one of the partners in the collaborative research program Our Future Health, which involves millions of volunteers. provides health data and also collaborates with the UK Biobank, a leading biomedical database.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning tools examine data to try to find patterns and determine what puts a person at increased risk of obesity.
Efforts to find a calculation to predict obesity mark an important step forward. in the perception of this state.
For years, obesity was seen as a problem that could simply be solved by telling people to “eat less and move more.”
However, scientists now believe that obesity is a disease that can theoretically be treated like any other disease. other.
“Science is developing, and with it comes the realization that this is not a disease of choice or a disease of moral failure,” says Sarwar. “It is a biological disease that has many causes and has many consequences.”
More than one in eight people in the world are clinically obese.
In the UK, three out of 10 adults fall into this category. The epidemic costs the NHS around £6.5 billion a year. This figure is expected to rise to £9.7 billion by 2050.
Obesity is the second leading preventable cause of cancer. People who weigh above the threshold are more than 2.5 times more likely to develop high blood pressure and five times more likely to develop type 2 diabetes.
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Novo, on the other hand, is hopeful that a cure can be found. What exactly it will look like is an open question.
“What will a drug to prevent obesity look like?” – says Savar.
– “Would you like this? take once a year? Do you want to do this in a very convenient way? Would it be better to implement this approach in one country over another? We have a lot to figure out.”
Novo Nordisk says it is taking a “multi-pronged” approach to prevent people from gaining too much weight.
The company wants to “intercept that pathway so they don't become obese,” Sarwar says. “Or we can at least delay the time at which they become obese.”
The “interception” could be a drug or finding ways to influence behavior.
If Novo can crack the code and it will likely prove revolutionary. Treating obesity could help countries keep more people in work and in hospital beds.
It could also force a rethink of how health services around the world operate.
“Today We will wait for someone to become a patient, and once they are admitted, we will activate the health systems,” Sarwar says.
“What if we didn’t do this?” What if we intervened to prevent people from becoming patients in the first place? And will this happen through the healthcare systems we have today, which tend to be more disease-focused? We don't know.”
He admits there are “a lot of unknowns.”
For new preventive drugs, a significant hurdle will be proving that they actually work: ultimately, if they work, a person will never be overweight. The proposal has already raised some eyebrows in the pharmaceutical industry.
There are other potential hurdles ahead, not least how regulators will view these treatments.
“But this there is no reason not to study these issues,” says Sarwar.
There is a growing sense of urgency at Novo Nordisk, he says. Sarwar himself believes that “the clock is ticking.”
“If we are serious about ending obesity, solutions are needed to prevent this disease as quickly as possible,” he says. “And we want to do something yesterday.”
His team is “behaving with impatience.”
“We want to free ourselves from the usual bureaucracy and the usual delays that can be experienced in large organizations.”
This concern stems from the realization that the number of people around the world who are prone to obesity is increasing every day.
Sawar says: “We want to present these things as soon as possible because the burden of the disease is so great and its trajectory is now accelerating.”
As the pharmaceutical industry celebrates a recent breakthrough in treating obesity, Savard and his team are just getting started.
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