The story

Both halves were built at Novo Nordisk in Denmark. Jesper Lau's team published semaglutide in 2015, a GLP-1 analogue with a fatty acid tail that made it once weekly. Thomas Kruse's team solved amylin's clumping problem and published cagrilintide in 2021. Novo then gave the two together, first in small groups and then in large programmes across Europe, North America and Asia, including a 2026 Japanese and Taiwanese programme led by Toshimasa Yamauchi. Russian reviews by Shestakova and colleagues describe the amylin plus GLP-1 pairing as one of the leading next steps after single incretin drugs.