Ozempic’s greatest benefit might be its anti-inflammatory power

April 27, 2026

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Ozempic’s greatest benefit might be its anti-inflammatory power

A growing body of research suggests that GLP-1 drugs do more than control appetite and blood sugar. They could also fight inflammation

By Lauren J. Young edited by Tanya Lewis

Mohammed Haneefa Nizamudeen/Getty Images

Ozempic, Zepbound and other glucagonlike peptide 1 (GLP-1) drugs have shown sweeping health benefits—they can control blood sugar, manage body weight and improve heart health. And last year GLP-1 drugs received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval to treat kidney and liver disease.

Some scientists think these body-wide benefits are likely tied to the drugs’ weight-loss effects, but growing research suggests another factor may be at play: taming inflammation. To tease this out, researchers are trying to chart which anti-inflammatory pathways the drugs might activate. This could help them better understand what’s been seen clinically and open the door to GLP-1 treatments for a variety of inflammatory diseases, says Daniel Drucker, an endocrinologist at the University of Toronto, who is studying GLP-1 drugs’ widespread effects.

“Yes, weight loss is important, but it’s by no means the whole story,” he says. “We have patients [taking GLP-1s] who are telling us, ‘Wow, my arthritis is better,’ ‘My Crohn’s or colitis is better,’ and that motivates us to say, ‘Well, how is that happening?’”

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When a healthy immune system kicks into gear, it boosts inflammation to help fight off threats, such as bacteria or viruses. But research has shown that several metabolic and heart diseases impair the immune system’s ability to moderate inflammation—causing harmful levels of inflammation in response to high cholesterol, fat or glucose.

“The immune system gets ramped up where it shouldn’t,” says Marc Bonaca, a cardiologist and vascular medicine specialist at the University of Colorado Anschutz. Treatments that suppress the immune system can help lower chronic inflammation. But there’s a trade-off: dampening the immune system weakens its ability to tackle real infections.

Clinical trials and real-world data suggest that GLP-1s may be able to strike this balance, Bonaca says. Studies have shown that semaglutide (the active ingredient in Ozempic) leads to about a 40 percent reduction in the inflammation blood marker C-reactive protein—independent of weight loss. Other analyses suggest that GLP-1 drugs lower the risk of infections. Combined, this evidence suggests the drugs may be “calibrating or resetting the immune system in a way, not just suppressing it,” Bonaca says.

The receptors for GLP-1—the main hormone that the drugs mimic—are found in the gut and in many other organs. This means GLP-1 drugs can bind to cells throughout the body. “The liver, the heart, the blood vessels, the kidney and probably the brain as well—those are the major organs where we are pretty confident there’s a reduction of inflammation [from GLP-1 drugs],” Drucker says. This aligns with the list of conditions GLP-1 drugs have been approved to treat so far.

Most recently, Drucker’s team published a paper this month investigating cells of mice that were engineered to have a type of severe liver disease called metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH). Excess fat in the liver drives inflammation, which, over time, can lead to fibrosis—a severe scarring and stiffening of tissues. If the condition remains untreated, people can develop cirrhosis and require a liver transplant.

“Type 2 diabetes and obesity will [over time] contribute substantially to accumulating fat in the liver,” Drucker says. “So there’s no question that controlling blood sugar and losing weight are helpful. But very often that’s extremely difficult to do in people with metabolic liver disease, and diet and lifestyle modification alone has never been proven to substantially reverse the disease in a clinical trial.”

Semaglutide has been shown to help resolve MASH in human clinical trials, and the FDA approved the drug for that disease last year. Drucker’s team wanted to know if these clinical improvements were driven purely by weight loss or by lower inflammation as well.

GLP-1 receptors are expressed at very low levels in the liver, specifically in rare cells called liver sinusoidal endothelial cells. These specialized cells are part of the immune barrier between the gut and liver and “are intimately involve