Dr. Smith currently serves as Senior Vice President & Senior Global Medical Advisor at Zealand Pharma in Copenhagen Denmark. Prior to this position he served for 16 years as Chief Scientific Officer of AdventHealth Research Institute Orlando; guiding the research vision and scientific expansion of Florida’s largest network of hospitals.
Dr. Steven R. Smith earned his medical degree from the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, Texas, in 1988. He completed a residency in internal medicine at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, in 1991. He subsequently completed a two-year fellowship in clinical endocrinology and metabolism at the Ochsner Clinic and Hospital in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was a faculty member at Pennington Biomedical Research Center for 15 years and then established translational research and established an enterprise-wide research institute with over 400 employees and more than 350 physician scientists.
Dr. Smith’s own science bridges the gaps between cell/molecular biology endocrinology and metabolism, and clinical care. This approach is known as translational medicine and involves translating discoveries in the basic sciences into the clinic and using clinical knowledge to direct the basic scientist. For over 30 years his research was focused on obesity, diabetes and the metabolic origins of cardiovascular disease. That body of work taught us how individuals differ in their ability to burn fat, how adipose tissue becomes dysfunctional in obesity, and how obesity leads to type 2 diabetes. He also discovered a new endocrine hormone that increases calorie burning. Most importantly, his labs discovery that the inability to burn fat is programmed into muscle cells provides a novel way to identify and test new treatments for obesity and diabetes. More recent studies revealed hidden epigenetic mechanisms that regulate body fat distribution in women. This and other translational work demonstrated that each person is unique at the molecular/ cellular level, suggesting new ways to match therapies to the individual; this is the goal of the new field of ‘personalized’ medicine.
In the clinic, Dr. Smith has a special interest in the identification and development of drugs for the treatment of obesity and diabetes. In the mid 2000’s he was the Principal Investigator of the first clinical study showing that a pharmaceutical version of a peptide hormone amylin produced clinically relevant weight loss. This was a decade before incretin peptides like GLP-1s became revolutionary drugs to treat common metabolic diseases.
In his research career, Dr. Smith has published more than 300 papers and received a lifetime research achievement award from The Obesity Society. Dr. Smith also served as the elected President of the Obesity Society, the largest North American research, clinical and advocacy professional organization. He remains active in TOS including advocacy for persons with obesity and related metabolic diseases.
At Zealand Pharma, Dr. Smith currently supports research that is focused on the discovery of novel drugs to treat metabolic health and in the clinical development of a novel clinical stage amylin analogue, petrelintide.
Dr. Smith serves as an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Internal Medicine at Johns Hopkins University College of Medicine.