Robert Langer — MIT Institute Professor and one of the most cited researchers in history, pioneer of drug delivery systems and tissue engineering. He has co-founded roughly 40 biotech companies and holds over 1,100 patents.
The gist
Lex Fridman interviews Robert Langer, an MIT professor known as the 'Edison of Medicine,' about his decades pioneering controlled drug delivery and tissue engineering. Langer recounts early rejections of his work on stopping blood-vessel growth (angiogenesis inhibitors), which decades later led to drugs like Avastin. He explains how drugs are discovered, tested through phased clinical trials, and the multi-billion-dollar costs that make patents essential. He also discusses building successful startups, the importance of business talent, mentoring over a thousand students, and his optimistic-but-realistic view on curing cancer and extending healthy life.
Big reveals
- Langer's two seminal early papers were each first rejected by one top journal (Nature/Science) then accepted by the other after he swapped submissions.
- He admits the rejections were deeply depressing and that he got many grants rejected early in his career.
- His 1976 angiogenesis work took 28 years and billions of dollars before the first such drug, Avastin, got FDA approval in 2004.
- Langer says cutting off a tumor's blood supply to starve it seemed 'pretty crazy' to most people when Folkman first proposed it.
- He claims the most important factor in startup success is the business people, not the science.
- Langer is most proud of his students, not his discoveries, citing roughly a thousand trainees in top academies and companies.
- He believes cancer will one day be cured, though not soon, through a combination of biology and engineering.
Things worth remembering
- Langer has over 295,000 citations and an h-index of 269, making him the most cited engineer in history.
- Avastin became one of the top-selling biotech drugs ever and is approved for many cancers and eye diseases.
- Lab-grown human skin has already been FDA-approved and used for burn victims and diabetic skin ulcers.
- Langer holds over 1,100 current or pending patents licensed to over 300 companies.
- According to Tufts, making a new drug costs over two billion dollars, mostly due to clinical trials.
- Encapsulating cells so antibodies can't attack them is one strategy to prevent the body rejecting engineered tissue.
- Langer has helped launch around 40 companies estimated to be worth about twenty-three billion dollars.
- Langer calls CRISPR a beautiful idea, built on how bacteria destroy viruses, enabling cut-and-paste editing of genes.