A Future in Plastics

By Kellie Speed

If at age 56, receiving more than 120 major awards and having 500 issued or pending patents worldwide isn’t enough, how about winning a couple awards. Let’s say, the Lemelson-MIT prize, the world’s largest prize for being "one of history’s most prolific inventors in medicine" and maybe the Draper Prize, engineering’s highest honor for achievement and comparable to the Nobel Prize. Robert Langer has done just that.

But it hasn’t all come easily for Langer, the Kenneth L. Germeshausen Professor of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Early on, he was ridiculed for his ideas, and his first nine grant requests were even turned down. But since then, he has become the only engineer to receive the Gairdner Foundation International Award, received the General Motors Kettering Award for Cancer Research, and served as a member of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Science Board.

All this has brought Langer award payments totaling more than a whopping $1.5 million over the last six years. Who’s laughing now? "I have been very fortunate in getting recognition from both the engineering and medical community for what I have done," he relates.

A native of Albany, New York, Langer always knew he wanted to make a difference in the world, and that opportunity came after he received degrees in chemical engineering from Cornell University and MIT. His breakthrough role came while doing post-doctorate work at Harvard Medical School, when he began working alongside Judah Folkman, one of the world's leading cancer researchers. At that time, Folkman was searching for a plastic that would allow proteins to be released from it at a slow rate to treat a tumor. Just one year later, at the age of 27, Langer invented a new plastic that used proteins to release drugs and cancer-fighting chemicals into the body and later filed for the first of his 500 patents.

Through his work with Folkman, Langer was able to focus on the potential of large-molecule drugs -- defined as those with a molecular weight over 300 -- to fight cancer and other diseases through plastic delivery systems. Today, he is studying more ways to fight cancer and other diseases through such systems in a controlled environment. His engineering principles, which allow a desired release of medically important molecules from plastics, are now being studied worldwide. His systems use a variety of plastic materials such as ethylene vinyl acetate and polylactic glycolic acid.

Langer’s work in drug-releasing polymers eventually led to a new way to treat brain cancer. He created a small plastic disk that is inserted into the brain during tumor removal to release chemotherapy drugs directly into the brain, reducing the side effects of conventional chemotherapy. His groundbreaking invention became the first new brain cancer treatment in 25 years.

Today, Langer focuses on organ regeneration where eventually he hopes patients in need of a heart, liver, or lung transplant may go to a hospital and receive such an organ grown on polymer scaffolds from stem, donor, or host cells. As the founder of the field of tissue engineering, which includes restoring tissue by growing it on plastic, Langer hopes his invention will save the thousands of people who die each year awaiting transplants of organs and help others in need of bone and cartilage reconstruction.

MIT has even dedicated a lab to Langer, the Langer Lab in MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering, where graduate and postdoctorate students can study his numerous ideas. These include things such as a bio rubber that will allow the more elastic tissues of the body to be grown and the creation of a simulated heart muscle that will pulsate once placed inside a body.

Langer has also worked on biocompatible shape-memory polymers that would return to predetermined forms once inside a human body. For example, he created a surgical thread made of thermoplastic polymers that was designed to maintain a thread-like shape at room temperature. Once placed inside the body, the body’s heat would trigger the material to take on a medically useful form, including the ability to form a knot, bone screw, or stent for cardiac procedures.

The list goes on. Langer has worked on magnetically controlled drug-release implants and transdermal ultrasound drug delivery. And he has studied ways to create a biodegradable rubber for research related to gene therapy.

In reflecting on his prodigious accomplishments, Langer reveals, "I feel personally very satisfied and very rewarded largely because I feel the things we have done are doing a lot of good for people, improving and saving people’s lives. Any recognition is a bonus to me. I didn’t do it for the awards, but fortunately, there are places that do reward this, and I have gotten quite a lot of it."

For more information, visit http://web.mit.edu/cheme/langerlab

---

Kellie Speed is a freelance writer in Braintree, Massachusetts

---