24 Nov 2025 | By Jolanda van Hal
At the recent Discovery Forum on precision nutrition in the GLP-1 era, organized by the University of California (UC) Davis, US, we caught up with a metabolic health researcher and the program director at the Innovation Institute for Food and Health (IIFH).
“This is a tipping point,” Kim Fisher, director of programs at the UC Davis IIFH, tells Nutrition Insight. “GLP-1s and related metabolic hormones are very powerful, but I think we haven’t really begun to touch other indications,” says Fisher. “We have so much to learn about how they can impact all these other disorders.”
She notes that food companies are also increasingly approaching IIFH to create healthier, yet tasty, food products with the institute. “This could be a moment of change, where we eventually go back to having better food choices and reduce the need for these medications.”
Dr. Bethany Cummings, a professor at UC Davis School of Medicine, agrees that the GLP-1 field is undergoing “a revolution,” as it is shifting away from the idea that GLP-1 is primarily secreted from the gut.
“My lab is focused on understanding the effects of GLP-1 on the pancreatic islet. We’re interested in the idea of reprogramming alpha cells to produce GLP-1, which is a very attractive therapeutic target. We’re specifically looking at how amino acids regulate alpha cell biology,” says Cummings. “Endogenous GLP-1 production will never match the levels seen with drugs, but it’s still important and can have a metabolic benefit with fewer side effects. It might even inform better pharmacology in the future.”
