On June 26, 2011, in San Diego, the Merrifield Award of the American Peptide Society was given to Richard DiMarchi of Indiana University. A day later, again in San Diego, the Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award of the American Diabetes Association was given to Matthias Tschöp of the University of Cincinnati. Those attending both lectures might have witnessed many similarities; the Tschöp and DiMarchi laboratories had been working as a single integrated unit across two universities for the last seven years, designing and optimizing new therapeutics for the treatment of diabetes and obesity (Figure 1). JCI: How did the two of you start collaborating?

Tschöp: We met at the Eli Lilly Research Laboratories, where Richard led drug discovery as a group vice president, while I was a postdoctoral fellow. Years later, when I had moved back to the US from Germany and Richard had left Lilly to be a chair of chemistry at Indiana University, we reconnected—our labs suddenly were just a twohour drive apart.