In memoriam: Joel Habener

Joel Habener, an endocrinologist who discovered glucagon-like peptide-1, or GLP-1, died on December 28, 2025, in Newton, Massachusetts. He was 88. He was a member of the American Society for Biochemistry and Biology for 25 years, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator for 28 years.

Joel Habener

Born June 29, 1937, in Indianapolis, Habener earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of Redlands in California and received his M.D from the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He eventually became a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of the Laboratory of Molecular Endocrinology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

In the 1980s at Mass General, Habener studied the molecular causes of type 2 diabetes and worked to identify the gene for the hormone glucagon, which raises blood sugar levels when they fall too low. He studied the processing of the glucagon protein precursor, using anglerfish pancreatic endocrine cell clusters, which produce glucagon. Upon isolating and analyzing cDNAs from these clusters, his team found that glucagon is a cleavage product of a precursor protein that also encoded a previously unknown peptide resembling glucagon, now known as the fish homolog of GLP-1.

Later, Habener and his colleagues demonstrated that the act of increasing GLP-1 could be used to treat type 2 diabetes. This work helped pave the way for GLP-1-based therapies that have transformed the treatment of conditions like diabetes and obesity. For his work on GLP-1, Habener won the 2020 Warren Alpert Foundation Prize, the 2021 Canada Gairdner International Award and the 2024 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award. He was an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.

Habener is survived by his brother, nephew, sister-in-law and brother-in-law.