Cambridge Professor honoured with prestigious Endocrine Society award, marking a second consecutive win for Metabolic Science at the Cambridge Clinical Research Facility
The Endocrine Society has announced 12 leading endocrinologists as winners of its prestigious 2026 Laureate Awards -the top honours in the field -which include Professor Sadaf Farooqi, Professor of Metabolism and Medicine at the IMS-MRL, lead for the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre Nutrition, Obesity, Metabolism and Endocrinology theme and Deputy Director of NIHR Cambridge Clinical Research Facility. Professor Farooqi has been awarded the esteemed Gerald D. Aurbach Award for Outstanding Translational Research. This is the second year running that a Cambridge CRF researcher in the field of metabolic medicine has been honoured in such a way – last year, Professor Krish Chatterjee (NIHR CRF Director) won the same award for his contribution to the molecular basis of endocrine disorders and it’s application to clinical medicine.
The annual Laureate Awards recognise outstanding contributions to research that accelerate the transition of scientific discoveries into clinical applications and Professor Farooqi is being honoured for her discoveries of fundamental mechanisms that control human energy homeostasis. With colleagues, she discovered the first genes whose disruption causes severe obesity. In pioneering clinical studies, she established that the principal driver of human obesity is a failure of the central control of appetite and that the leptin-melanocortin pathway regulates food intake, macronutrient preference, food reward and body weight. Her research has changed the investigation, management and treatment of children and adults with severe obesity.
Established in 1944, the Society’s Laureate Awards recognise the highest achievements in the endocrinology field, including groundbreaking research and innovations in clinical care. The Endocrine Society will present the awards to the winners at ENDO 2026, the Society’s annual meeting in June.
Professor Sadaf Farooqi’s most recent publication, Human glucagon receptor deficiency causes early-onset liver steatosis was published at the end of August in Diabetes. Professor Farooqi, along with members of her team, have identified homozygous loss-of-function mutations in the gene encoding the glucagon receptor (GCGR), in a family in whom three individuals developed early-onset fatty liver disease (and in one case cirrhosis of the liver). While this condition is commonly associated with obesity, the family members had a normal body weight and all other known causes of liver disease were excluded.
Glucagon is known to play a key role in regulating carbohydrate and lipid metabolism acting via its receptors in the liver. Research in the lab showed that hepatocytes carrying the GCGR mutations could not clear lipid as expected, causing it to accumulate, proving a causal link between the mutations and fatty liver disease in patients.
These findings pave the way for additional mechanistic studies to identify downstream targets which could inform the design of treatments for patients and they also indicate that the relative potency of GCGR agonism may explain the degree to which these drugs impact body composition and hepatic steatosis.
