The 2024 Lasker Awards, recognising fundamental discoveries and clinical advances in human health, have gone to US researchers who used animals in their work on immunity and obesity drugs.

The Lasker Basic Award went to Zhijian ‘James’ Chen, at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, for uncovering the cGAS enzyme – that senses both the body’s DNA and foreign DNA, and supports our immune defence against bacteria, viruses and other microbes, as well as tumours.

However, cGAS can also be involved in the body mistakenly attacking itself (autoimmunity) and so has been implicated in many conditions, from arthritis to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

The research therefore holds enormous potential to develop new drugs, treat cancer and boost health, while providing a key insight into the body’s innate defences.

Prof Chen’s experiments included the use of both living mice and mouse cells to shed light on the function and structure of cGAS. For example, he showed that mice lacking the enzyme had a much weaker immune response when infected with a DNA virus, thus helping to identify the vital role of cGAS for sensing DNA and establishing the immune response.

Animals were also involved in research for the Lasker Clinical Award, which led to the development of revolutionary GLP-1-based drugs to treat obesity, including the well-publicised weight-loss drug Ozempic.

Two of the laureates, Joel Habener, of Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, and Svetlana Mojsov, of Rockefeller University, New York, used both anglerfish and rat pancreases, to gain insights into how to make the GLP-1 hormone active in the body.