A major opinion essay published in The New York Times places APS member Richard DiMarchi at the center of one of the most consequential questions in contemporary medicine: why does a drug class developed to treat diabetes appear to benefit such a wide range of human diseases?
DiMarchi, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Gill Chair in Biomolecular Sciences at Indiana University, spent two decades at Eli Lilly before joining IU in 2003, where he and collaborator Matthias Tschöp pioneered the unimolecular multiagonist approach that ultimately led to today's dual and triple incretin receptor therapies. The essay, written by health journalist Julia Belluz, surveys the rapidly expanding off-label use of GLP-1 medicines for conditions ranging from traumatic brain injury and long Covid to addiction, arthritis, and inflammatory disease.
DiMarchi's perspective in the piece goes beyond the pharmacology. He offers a unifying hypothesis for why a single drug class can touch so many seemingly unrelated conditions. "What we've come to realize," he is quoted as saying, "is that many diseases may share the same root causes, even though we label them and treat them as distinct." An endocrine disease, a cardiovascular disease, a brain disease, DiMarchi argues, these categories may obscure a common underlying biology that GLP-1 medicines happen to address. The drugs, he suggests, may make patients "more metabolically flexible" and "biochemically more youthful" in ways that cut across traditional diagnostic boundaries.
Among the cases the essay profiles is a traumatic brain injury patient who sought out DiMarchi directly after encountering preclinical research suggesting GLP-1s might address concussion-related neuroinflammation. DiMarchi directed her to discuss GLP-1 therapy with her physician. The patient's reported improvement led DiMarchi to call publicly for formal human trials in traumatic brain injury, an area he described as showing "incredible promise," while urging caution about outrunning the evidence. "What we know right now," he told the author, "is small relative to what we don't know."
That caution is characteristic of the scientific disposition DiMarchi has brought to GLP-1 research throughout his career. The essay notes that the anti-inflammatory properties of GLP-1 medicines, now recognized as a central mechanism behind many of the drugs' weight-independent benefits, were not anticipated when the compounds were first developed for glycemic control. The biology, it turns out, was more interesting than the original model suggested.
DiMarchi is emphatic that multiple laboratories, some direct and some indirect enabled the GLP-1 era. The foundational advances in peptide synthesis, structure-activity relationships, pharmacokinetic optimization, and receptor pharmacology that made these medicines possible represent the cumulative contribution of a global scientific community, one that the American Peptide Society has constituted for six decades. Chemists, biologists, and clinicians working across academia and industry, many of them APS members, built the intellectual infrastructure on which today's breakthrough peptide therapeutics reside. The GLP-1 moment is, in that sense, a peptide science moment — and a reminder that basic research pursued with conviction and patience, often against commercial indifference, can reshape the practice of medicine in unappreciated ways.
The Times essay is available to subscribers at The New York Times, DiMarchi's foundational contributions to multiagonist peptide design are described in APS research coverage of the DiMarchi Group at Indiana University.
