2002 Winner: Dr. Robert S. Langer
For extraordinary contributions to the bioengineering of revolutionary medical drug delivery systems.
Biography
Robert S. Langer is one of 14 Institute Professors (the highest honor awarded to a faculty member) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was born in Albany New York in 1948. Langer received his bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in 1970 and his doctorate from MIT in 1974, both in chemical engineering. Langer has received honorary doctorates from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH), Switzerland, the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Israel, and the Universite Catholique do Louvain, Belgium. He has written over 400 patents which have been licensed or sublicensed to over 80 pharmaceutical, chemical, biotechnology, and medical device companies; a number of companies were launched on the basis of these patent licenses.
Langer has received more than 80 major awards, including the Gairdner Foundation International Award (1996); the Lemelson-MIT Prize(1998); the Dickson Prize for Science (2002); Heinz Award for Technology, Economy and Employment (2003); the Harvey Prize (2003); the John Fritz Award (2003); the General Motors Kettering Award for Cancer Research (2004); the National Medal of Science (2006); and the Millenium Technology Prize (2008).
In 1989, Langer was elected to the Institute of Medicine, and in 1992 he was elected to both the National Academy of Engineering and to the National Academy of Sciences.
Drug Delivery Systems
Until recently, many potentially useful medicines worked poorly in patients – or not at all – because there was no good way to get them into the body at the right time and place. Some drugs break down easily, disappearing long before they reach their intended destination. Others, like cancer drugs, are harmful to the rest of the body and only really safe if you can deliver them directly to the tissue that needs them. Still others work best if they are released into the bloodstream very gradually. Then, starting in the 1970s, Robert Langer and his colleagues began to develop special plastics that could solve these problems. Using materials that are safe in the body, Langer’s group has found ways to fine-tune their structure so that they can hold medicines and then release them as needed. The result has been an explosion of new therapies for major diseases.
