Duke University School of Medicine is building an institutional push to connect aging research with the next generation of GLP-1 drugs, and a May 20 conversation between faculty researcher Rana Gupta and Dean Mary E. Klotman put the effort on display.

Gupta, the W. David and Sarah W. Stedman Distinguished Professor of Medicine, studies how adipose (fat) tissue adapts to stress and aging. His lab published a consensus atlas of human and mouse adipose tissue at single-cell resolution in Nature Metabolism in May 2025, and a 2022 Science paper demonstrated that time-restricted feeding mitigates obesity through adipocyte thermogenesis. In the conversation with Klotman, published on the medical school's website, Gupta discussed his work on "metabolic resilience" and cited collaborative research with Christopher Newgard showing that early-life nutritional challenges, including food insecurity, can have lasting metabolic effects.

The commercial thread runs through the Duke Molecular Physiology Institute. Newgard, the institute's director, is collaborating with Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk to study how next-generation GLP-1 drug combinations work. "We need to help drug companies understand what you do to metabolism as you add each of these warheads to the drugs," Newgard said in Duke's Magnify Magazine earlier in 2026. Most patients on current GLP-1 medications lose 10% to 15% of their body weight in a year, according to the same report, but up to half stop taking them within 12 months.

The aging connection is explicit. DMPI scientists are partnering with Heather Whitson, director of the Duke Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development, to research how GLP-1 medications affect aging itself. Gupta's adipose tissue work and the DMPI's drug-development collaborations sit in the same department, led by David D'Alessio, Lindquist Presidential Distinguished Chair in Duke's Department of Medicine.

The Whitson-DMPI partnership represents the most concrete intersection: studying whether drugs built for weight loss might also slow biological aging.