Ruth Gimeno, Ph.D., Group Vice President, Cardiometabolic Research at Eli Lilly and Company, is a drug hunter and drug developer, driven to uncover — and champion — potential new therapies for obesity, diabetes, and cardiometabolic health. She’s spent her career bringing together researchers, academics, small companies, and startups to brainstorm ways to turn promising science into ground-breaking new therapies, always with an eye on how discoveries can improve patients’ lives.
“I love the challenge of starting with pioneering fundamental discoveries and turning them into something that is useful for patients,” she explains.
Her interest in therapeutics started early. Following her Ph.D. in biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Gimeno worked on obesity therapies at the biotech firm Millennium Pharmaceuticals, just as the basic science on obesity was breaking. “We were excited about finding ways to turn this new biology into therapies, but we quickly realized that the problem was a lot harder than we had anticipated,” she notes.
Her career took her to Wyeth, where she first started to work on gut peptides, then to Pfizer and then to Eli Lilly in 2011 to lead their diabetes discovery research. Today, her work spans many cardiometabolic diseases — obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, renal, women’s health and healthy aging — reaching from idea to the end of Phase 2, and using the entire toolbox for making therapeutics, including small molecules, proteins, peptides, and genetic medicines.
Gimeno quickly dispels the notion that GLP-1-based medicines like Mounjaro and Zepbound came out of nowhere; rather, she emphasizes that research on incretins started back in the 1960s and it took many years of preclinical and clinical work and many product iterations to make the medicines that show the efficacy we know today. “We needed to learn how to make longer-acting peptides, combine multiple pharmacologies, and find the best way to use these medicines in patients to truly see the impact on people’s lives that we see today.”
Today, Eli Lilly is focused on finding additional ways to help people with obesity and other metabolic disorders. This includes investigational molecules such as retatrutide, a long-acting peptide that combines three mechanisms to help patients lose more weight with additional metabolic benefits, and eloralintide, a peptide that mimics naturally occurring amylin, but is engineered to minimize side effects. On the cardiovascular front, Lilly is exploring new mechanisms of lowering cardiovascular risk with drugs designed to lower Lp(a), and is spearheading the development of “one-and-done” therapies aiming for life-long protection from cardiovascular risk with a single course of treatment that mimics naturally occurring protective gene variants.
Gimeno trained in medicine at Julius-Maximilians-University in Würzburg, Germany before earning her Ph.D. from MIT. She co-authored multiple academic studies and papers, serves on the scientific board of biotech incubator Lilly Gateway Labs, and the board of directors of life sciences nonprofit BioCrossroads. In 2022, she was named to Endpoints News as one of the 20 women leading biopharma R&D.
We’re delighted that Dr. Gimeno is joining our DOC 2026 Faculty, where she will join Alex Ginsberg, Pharm.D., and Helen Messier, M.D., Ph.D., to talk about the “Rise of the Peptides.” Please welcome her to our community and gathering.