AI transcript
0:00:00 [MUSIC]
0:00:06 Pushkin.
0:00:06 [MUSIC]
0:00:11 >> Hey everybody, I’m Kai Rizdal, the host of Marketplace,
0:00:13 your daily download on the economy.
0:00:16 Money influences so much of what we do and how we live.
0:00:19 That’s why it’s essential to understand how this economy works.
0:00:23 At Marketplace, we break down everything from inflation and
0:00:26 student loans to the future of AI so that you can understand what it all means for you.
0:00:32 Marketplace is your secret weapon for understanding this economy.
0:00:35 Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:00:37 [MUSIC]
0:00:41 >> You want to start listing off the companies of which you’re a founder and
0:00:44 a co-founder and stop wherever you get tired?
0:00:47 >> I mean, I can try to do that, but that might take some time.
0:00:50 >> Give me a handful.
0:00:52 Count off five on your fingers just for fun.
0:00:55 >> Sure.
0:00:57 Well, Moderna, Momenta, PureTech, Sear, Living Proof.
0:01:03 >> For a sec, I thought you were just going to do the M’s, which might have been a while.
0:01:07 >> I could, I could do with the A’s too.
0:01:11 >> Robert Langer has founded or co-founded something like 40 companies.
0:01:15 He’s an institute professor at MIT, he holds over 1,000 patents, and
0:01:21 his research has been cited more than 400,000 times.
0:01:26 But when he started his career in the 1970s,
0:01:29 he didn’t seem bound for professional glory.
0:01:32 He had a hard time finding a job, he couldn’t get funding for
0:01:35 his research, and his patent applications kept getting rejected.
0:01:39 And I think these two things, his early struggles and
0:01:43 his later massive success, are in fact closely connected.
0:01:48 Langer was trying to do something that was deeply and
0:01:51 profoundly different than what anybody had done before.
0:01:55 Almost nobody understood it.
0:01:57 Almost nobody knew what to do with him.
0:01:59 And then when his work finally did succeed,
0:02:02 it was such a new, powerful discovery that people are still building on it today,
0:02:08 half a century later.
0:02:09 [MUSIC]
0:02:15 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and this is What’s Your Problem.
0:02:17 A show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress.
0:02:22 Robert Langer is still working, still doing research, still founding companies.
0:02:26 And we talked about some of his current work in the later part of our conversation.
0:02:31 But to start, we went back to the mid-1970s,
0:02:34 when Langer got his doctorate in chemical engineering.
0:02:38 And he did something that, at the time, was really unusual.
0:02:42 He did a postdoc with a medical school professor,
0:02:45 a pediatric surgeon named Judah Folkman.
0:02:48 Langer’s field is bioengineering.
0:02:50 Basically, bringing the tools of engineering to the fields of biology and medicine.
0:02:56 And bioengineering is a huge field today.
0:02:59 But it barely existed back when Langer started his postdoc with that doctor,
0:03:04 Judah Folkman.
0:03:06 And bioengineering was exactly what Judah Folkman needed.
0:03:10 Folkman had an idea for a new kind of drug.
0:03:13 And this kind of drug was a molecule that was too big and complex to be given as a pill.
0:03:19 So Folkman needed somebody who could figure out how to deliver this new kind of drug to patients.
0:03:26 As you’ll hear, that delivery problem was fundamentally an engineering problem.
0:03:31 And when Langer solved that problem, he created an entirely new way to get medicine to patients.
0:03:37 And it proved incredibly useful.
0:03:43 Tell me about being an engineer and going off to work in the 1970s in the lab of a physician.
0:03:50 On the one hand, for me, it was very hard because I had to learn a lot about medical things.
0:03:55 And I didn’t know very much biology.
0:03:58 So that was difficult.
0:04:01 But on the other hand, being an engineer, I guess I had a different perspective.
0:04:06 You know, that I didn’t maybe think the same way as a clinician or surgeon or biologist.
0:04:14 You know, engineers, they solved problems.
0:04:16 And Judah Folkman, who was my boss at the time, I mean, that’s what he wanted.
0:04:21 He wanted to see a problem solved.
0:04:23 So let’s talk specifically about that problem.
0:04:26 What did you go to Dr. Folkman’s lab to work on?
0:04:31 Dr. Folkman had this idea that if you could stop blood vessels, you could stop cancer.
0:04:36 It wasn’t — most people didn’t think he was right.
0:04:40 In fact, he went further.
0:04:41 He said that the reason blood vessels come to the tumor is that the tumor makes a chemical signal.
0:04:50 He called the tumor angiogenesis factor.
0:04:53 And he said that was chemically mediated.
0:04:55 And also the idea that he thought about is if that was chemically mediated, maybe stopping
0:05:01 it could also be chemically mediated.
0:05:03 So my job really, in a way, was to prove that he was right because almost everybody told
0:05:09 him he was wrong.
0:05:11 And in so doing, isolate the first, you know, blood vessel or angiogenesis inhibitor.
0:05:17 And so it’s basically that there is this theory that he had that tumors stimulate the growth
0:05:23 of new blood vessels.
0:05:25 And then if that’s true, perhaps you could inhibit the growth of new blood vessels and
0:05:30 thereby inhibit the growth of tumors, right?
0:05:34 And so you get there and I’m interested in that inhibition piece, right?
0:05:39 Because that seems like that’s where you’re really in a very direct way bringing your engineering
0:05:45 skills to bear on this medical problem.
0:05:47 So like talk about that side of it and how you approached it.
0:05:51 But what we wanted to do was have a little nanoparticle or microparticle that could deliver
0:05:56 different molecules.
0:05:58 I was isolating and these were fairly large molecules.
0:06:02 So that was really the idea and then see, could it stop the blood vessels?
0:06:06 So this core idea of developing a nanoparticle to deliver a large molecule, basically a complicated
0:06:14 drug, is an engineering problem, right?
0:06:17 This nanoparticle, it’s like we’ve got this drug, call it, that we think might be able
0:06:22 to stop tumor growth.
0:06:23 But how do we get it to the tumor, right?
0:06:25 That is a basic problem that you are coming up against early in your research.
0:06:30 And that problem winds up being a big deal, right?
0:06:33 And the way you go about solving that problem winds up being a big deal.
0:06:37 So tell me about that.
0:06:40 Well, the nanoparticles and microparticles really it’s taking molecules, drugs and encapsulating
0:06:48 surrounding them with a lipid or a polymer and delivering it to cells or a patient or
0:06:56 an animal.
0:06:57 And a lipid or a polymer is basically some fat or some plastic?
0:07:00 Yeah.
0:07:01 Yeah.
0:07:02 Lipid is some fat and polymer, some plastic, generally speaking.
0:07:07 So yeah, if you just gave the drug by itself and it wasn’t packaged in those particles,
0:07:11 it would just get destroyed.
0:07:13 I mean, so the number one reason you do it is to protect it, you know, otherwise it
0:07:20 won’t, you know, it’ll just get destroyed probably almost immediately.
0:07:25 So you know, we asked people who were experts in that area, Nobel Prize winners and others
0:07:31 who had done work on, or at least helped on delivery of small molecules.
0:07:37 And we asked them about that, but they all told us it wasn’t possible.
0:07:41 So I spent years in the laboratory experimenting, finding hundreds of different ways to failing
0:07:47 hundreds of different times.
0:07:49 But finally I was successful and, you know, we published a paper in Nature in 1976, The
0:07:57 General Nature, and showed for the first time that you could deliver large molecules
0:08:02 this way.
0:08:04 And we published a paper in Science in 1976 showing for the first time that you could
0:08:09 stop blood vessels by using approaches like this.
0:08:12 And as I understand it, even after you published those papers, you met a lot of resistance.
0:08:18 Yeah.
0:08:19 I did.
0:08:20 I suppose I met a lot of resistance for a couple of ways, first different people didn’t
0:08:25 agree with it or didn’t believe it or didn’t think it was possible.
0:08:28 Secondly, my background really wasn’t right, I suppose, for the different review sections.
0:08:35 I was an engineer and when we sent the grants to like the National Institutes of Health
0:08:42 and places like that, you know, they had medical people or biological people reviewing it.
0:08:46 And they said, well, what can an engineer, you know, he doesn’t know anything about
0:08:50 biology or oncology.
0:08:52 Separately, I met a lot of resistance when I tried to do this, get a job in an engineering
0:08:58 department.
0:08:59 They said, well, engineers, the chemical engineering department, they said, engineers really don’t
0:09:04 do experimental biology.
0:09:06 So I didn’t get any faculty positions in the chemical engineering department.
0:09:10 For a very, very long time, I ended up in the nutrition department.
0:09:13 And so, I mean, this idea of bioengineering, that is a big deal now and was very novel
0:09:20 then.
0:09:21 It feels like you’re sort of coming up against this problem of creating a field that doesn’t
0:09:26 quite exist yet or at least creating a part of a field that doesn’t exist yet.
0:09:30 Which seems like on the one hand, the opportunity to solve very large problems was clearly there.
0:09:34 On the other hand, the kind of institutional structure to allow that to happen was not on
0:09:39 your side.
0:09:40 Yeah, you’re right.
0:09:41 I mean, either had been people in chemical engineering doing work on what I’d call mathematical
0:09:47 modeling or transport of molecules.
0:09:50 But experimental stuff, inventing things, yeah, and discovering new molecules, that
0:09:56 certainly had not been done, never been done in chemical engineering up until that time.
0:10:04 So that ended up being hard.
0:10:07 Is it right that some of your early patent applications around this technology were also
0:10:11 rejected?
0:10:12 Yeah, they were.
0:10:13 I mean, the first, the main patent on it got rejected five times in a row, but sometimes
0:10:21 that happens.
0:10:22 I’ve had, after that, I think I had one when we came up with the idea of tissue engineering,
0:10:27 I think that got rejected even more.
0:10:29 So anyhow, those things happen.
0:10:31 And so you get the patents and you end up licensing the technology initially to one
0:10:37 or more big companies, right, big pharmaceutical companies.
0:10:41 What happens with that?
0:10:42 Yeah, well, actually, the hospital did that, the license, because I mean, the patents is
0:10:46 my name, but they licensed it.
0:10:48 You know, well, I was very excited about that.
0:10:52 There were two multi-billion dollar companies, one in animal health, one in human health.
0:10:57 So they gave me a consulting fee.
0:11:00 They gave me actually a very large grant, which for young professors, terrific.
0:11:05 Most importantly, they were going to work on it.
0:11:07 And they did work on it for maybe up to a year, but then they just gave up.
0:11:12 So I got the grant and the consulting fee, but I didn’t get what I wanted most, which
0:11:17 was to see the work that we did make a difference in the world.
0:11:20 Were you surprised when they gave up?
0:11:22 What was your response when they gave up?
0:11:24 I guess I was sad.
0:11:26 I don’t know that I was surprised.
0:11:27 I certainly have seen plenty of places give up before, but it made me sad.
0:11:32 I really thought that this was a way of moving things forward, was having companies take what
0:11:40 you published and put what you did and develop it, but I was mostly sad.
0:11:46 So how do you get from there to starting your first company?
0:11:49 Yeah, well, a good friend of mine, Alex Klebinoff, he was a professor in that nutrition department.
0:11:55 Later he was a professor in the chemistry department at MIT.
0:12:00 He said to me one day after this happened, he said, “Well, Bob, we should start our own
0:12:04 company.”
0:12:05 So I thought, yeah, if you’re not your own champion, nobody else is going to be.
0:12:10 So we did, and I got a number of my students to join that company, and they were very excited
0:12:17 about it.
0:12:18 So that ended up, they weren’t going to give up very easily.
0:12:23 And so you keep working on this original idea of a particle that can deliver a drug, a large
0:12:30 molecule drug basically, and when does it become clear to you that it’s going to work?
0:12:38 Well, actually for me, it was pretty clear it was going to work when we wrote that early
0:12:43 paper of nature.
0:12:44 I mean, I thought I’d see it with my own eyes.
0:12:47 I put certain types of, well, I’m trying to think I explained this, I put certain enzymes,
0:12:51 those are all large molecules in these materials, and I had this test that would turn color
0:12:58 if the enzymes are coming out.
0:13:01 And I’ve got to see it not work many, many times, hundreds of times, but finally I did
0:13:07 see it work.
0:13:08 So I didn’t see how this couldn’t, so since I saw it with my own eyes, but that didn’t
0:13:15 mean that other people were going to necessarily believe it, but I did.
0:13:20 And I had people still 10, 15 years later tell me couldn’t possibly be right.
0:13:26 I mean, very experienced people, but that’s the world.
0:13:30 I mean, a lot of times they’re skepticism.
0:13:33 And what was the first drug from that idea that made it to the market, that made it to
0:13:39 patients?
0:13:40 You know, we had this collaboration with a company called Takeda, it’s a Japanese company,
0:13:46 and they had sent people to our lab every year, and we got a grant from them, and they
0:13:51 created what’s called Lupron Depot, and that ultimately did get approved, and still versions
0:14:00 of it are widely used today.
0:14:02 What kind of patients did that treat?
0:14:04 What did that drug do?
0:14:05 It was a way to treat advanced prostate cancer and endometriosis.
0:14:09 And was it the anti-angiogenesis?
0:14:11 Was it inhibiting the formation of blood vessels, or was it something else?
0:14:15 No, no, it was affecting the hormones.
0:14:17 It was a different hormonal thing.
0:14:19 The angiogenesis ones, they’re, you know, other people use the assays we’ve developed
0:14:27 and other things that we did and things that they did themselves, and they would ultimately
0:14:31 get many drugs approved, but it took many, many years.
0:14:36 That didn’t take place until 2004.
0:14:39 Can you just list off some of the conditions, diseases that are treated with this, you know,
0:14:46 technology and the offshoots of this technology that you came up with?
0:14:49 Well, prostate cancer and endometriosis, I mean, there are treatments for heart diseases,
0:14:54 heart and eye diseases, schizophrenia, opioid addiction, osteoarthritis, diabetes, I mean,
0:15:04 I’m sure I’m leaving out a lot, but those are some.
0:15:10 Still to come on the show?
0:15:11 How Robert Langer wound up creating 40 companies.
0:15:15 Also, the research he’s excited about today.
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0:16:09 Hey everybody, I’m Kyle Riznall, the host of Marketplace, your daily download of our
0:16:15 on-the-economy.
0:16:16 Money influences so much of what we do and how we live.
0:16:20 That’s why it’s essential to understand how this economy works.
0:16:24 At Marketplace, we break down everything from inflation and student loans to the future
0:16:28 of AI so that you can understand what it all means for you.
0:16:33 Marketplace is your secret weapon for understanding this economy.
0:16:36 Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:16:42 So after you started that one initial company, you wound up starting or being a co-founder
0:16:48 of a lot of companies.
0:16:50 I don’t have the number in front of me.
0:16:51 Is dozens the right order of magnitude?
0:16:53 Yeah, 40, 40, 41, something like that.
0:16:56 Yeah, like how’s that happen?
0:17:00 How’d that happen?
0:17:01 Well.
0:17:02 It’s a lot of companies.
0:17:03 Yeah, but it’s over close to a 40-year period.
0:17:07 Oh, a company a year seems like a lot to me.
0:17:09 I don’t know.
0:17:10 Yeah.
0:17:11 I have a big lab.
0:17:12 I have a lot of graduate students.
0:17:14 Some of the graduate students would see what I did and both stocks, and they wanted to
0:17:19 start companies.
0:17:20 So we did.
0:17:21 I mean, we may have done work in the lab for five or six years, and then when it got to
0:17:25 a certain stage, we spun it out.
0:17:27 And some people with other people, colleagues of mine, would see that I had done this and
0:17:34 so they’d come to me and talk to me about companies.
0:17:37 So yeah, we kept doing it.
0:17:39 I mean, to me, it’s been a great route for taking discoveries in the academic lab and
0:17:46 getting them out to the world.
0:17:48 And as I mentioned, I had a hard time maybe given the stage of the work to get large companies
0:17:57 that would do it.
0:17:58 So we did it ourselves.
0:18:01 And when you started your first company, I feel like it was much less common for professors
0:18:09 to start companies than it is now.
0:18:11 I’m curious, sort of culturally, you know, within MIT, within academia, what was that
0:18:17 like?
0:18:18 Did you get pushback?
0:18:20 I think anytime money’s involved, a lot of people will tell you, and I think there’s
0:18:25 jealousy about it and people feel you shouldn’t be spending your time doing that even at MIT.
0:18:33 So yeah, I ran into problems when people were thinking about me for promotion.
0:18:41 You know, at one point I had a partial chair and they took that away from me.
0:18:47 So yeah, it was discouraging in the beginning.
0:18:52 In fact, I’d say when I was in the nutrition department, some people told me that the drug
0:18:59 delivery ideas, they would never work and I should be looking for a new job.
0:19:04 You feel like you have gained insight into what that moment is or particular elements
0:19:12 of that moment when you take something that is basic research, academic research, and
0:19:18 decide, okay, this is the moment we’re going to take the leap, we’re going to start a company,
0:19:21 we’re going to try and commercialize it.
0:19:23 How do you know?
0:19:24 Well, I don’t think you ever know for sure, but the kinds of high-level rules that I’ve
0:19:29 used are generally you have what I’ll call as a platform technology, meaning it’s almost
0:19:34 like a plug-and-play thing.
0:19:36 Those drug delivery systems are a good example, right?
0:19:38 You could use it for drug A, drug B, drug C. Then I think the next thing is that you’ve
0:19:46 taken it a certain distance, right?
0:19:48 You have maybe animal data.
0:19:52 You also have a paper, ideally a good journal like, say, Science or Nature.
0:19:58 You have a patent or your high likelihood of getting a patent because you’ve advanced
0:20:02 a certain distance.
0:20:03 Usually, there are people in my lab that want to be involved in it.
0:20:10 Those are the kinds of things that inform my thinking about it.
0:20:17 So what is something right now on the basic research side that you’re excited about?
0:20:24 What is a big idea that is early that you think holds a lot of promise?
0:20:27 Well, I think the tissue engineering work we’re doing holds a lot of promise.
0:20:32 I mean, an example that we’re doing is we’re working with Lee Wei Sai, who’s head of MIT’s
0:20:37 Pick Hour Institute, and I have a wonderful postdoc, Alice Stenton.
0:20:42 We’re actually creating a brain on a chip.
0:20:45 It’s not been published yet, but she’s been able to convert, like say, we could take your
0:20:52 cells and convert it first IPS cells and then convert each of those depending on what we
0:20:57 do to a different brain cell type, six different cell types.
0:21:01 She’s found a matrix that she can put them on and that really makes them grow and function.
0:21:09 So that’s something I’m excited about.
0:21:13 When you say put it on a chip, what does that mean and then what do you do with my brain
0:21:17 on a chip?
0:21:18 Yeah.
0:21:19 Well, what I mean by in a chip, it’s in vitro, it’s not in an animal, it’s not in a person.
0:21:24 What it means is that you could rather, like you could think about if you were going to
0:21:28 do experiment on a person, I mean, of course, there’s a lot you wouldn’t be able to find
0:21:32 out anyhow because we’d have to take you apart and we’re obviously not going to do that.
0:21:36 I appreciate that.
0:21:37 Yeah.
0:21:38 And with animals, you know, it’s a little bit similar here.
0:21:43 So what you do with it is you could literally test thousands and thousands of experiments
0:21:51 and get readouts on them.
0:21:53 So it might someday reduce animal testing, hopefully also reduce human testing and may
0:21:59 greatly speed up drug discovery.
0:22:01 I mean, there’s so many drugs that you’d like to be able to have for brain disease, right?
0:22:06 Like for Alzheimer’s, for Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS for Parkinson’s.
0:22:10 So I hope someday.
0:22:11 Brain disease has been famously difficult to treat with drugs, right?
0:22:15 It’s a very, very hard set of diseases.
0:22:18 Right.
0:22:19 Because we don’t understand it well enough and the tests are very, very hard to do.
0:22:23 So something like this, if it truly ends up working well, you know, could change that
0:22:29 someday.
0:22:30 But that’s an example of something I’m excited about.
0:22:33 As you said, it’s like, it’s a platform, right?
0:22:35 Presumably, if you could do brain cells, you could do different kinds of cells, it could
0:22:38 be a way to do lots of testing.
0:22:41 Well, we’ve done, yeah, well, we’ve put, in this case, we have six different brain cell
0:22:45 types in vitro.
0:22:47 We have, are working on other cell types too.
0:22:50 We have a gastrointestinal tract on a chip.
0:22:52 We’ve had a heart on a chip.
0:22:54 And of course, it’s not just putting them on chips.
0:22:56 Someday, you could use it for repairing tissues, you know, you could maybe, I mean, in fact,
0:23:02 Laura Nicholson, one of my former postdocs, she runs a company that’s making new blood
0:23:07 vessels that’s been used on patients in the Ukraine.
0:23:10 Others have used made artificial skin for burn victims or patients with diabetic skin
0:23:15 ulcers.
0:23:16 And people are trying to make new cartilage, all kinds of tissues.
0:23:20 So, yeah, so that’s, that is a big, you know, that’s an exciting area.
0:23:25 And that tissue engineering side, I mean, does that go back to a kind of similar origin
0:23:30 story, right?
0:23:31 I know there was sort of early tissue engineering work that you did as well.
0:23:34 What was that work?
0:23:35 Yeah.
0:23:36 Well, they are, one of the people I got to meet at Children’s Hospital was Jay Vakante.
0:23:40 He was a pediatric surgeon, still is.
0:23:43 And he was treating patients with liver failure.
0:23:46 And one day he came to see me, he said, “Bob, you know, I do all these transplants, would
0:23:51 it ever be possible to make a liver from scratch?”
0:23:54 And he and I brainstormed and came up with a way that we hope might do that with polymer
0:24:02 scaffolds and cells.
0:24:05 And so we’ve continued on working together and separately and different ways to make
0:24:09 this happen.
0:24:11 But that started probably over 40 years ago, and that certainly was the basis for a lot
0:24:18 of these things.
0:24:19 So we can’t synthesize livers yet, but what are some of the clinical applications that
0:24:24 have been found to some of the research you did there?
0:24:27 Well, you can make artificial skin for burn victims, you, it looks like we’ll be able
0:24:31 to make blood vessels.
0:24:32 I mean, there have been clinical trials on a variety of things ranging from new spinal
0:24:38 cord repair, to hearing loss, you know, a lot of different things.
0:24:43 But I think ultimately it’s unlimited, you know, and you could theoretically use approaches
0:24:48 like this if you understand the right cells, the right signals, the right biology and the
0:24:53 right engineering.
0:24:54 I don’t see that there’s necessarily any limit to what you could use it for.
0:24:58 But people, we need to understand it more.
0:25:04 We’ll be back in a minute with The Lightning Round.
0:25:16 Hey everybody, I’m Kai Rizdal, the host of Marketplace, your daily download on the economy.
0:25:22 Money influences so much of what we do and how we live.
0:25:26 That’s why it’s essential to understand how this economy works.
0:25:29 At Marketplace, we break down everything from inflation and student loans to the future
0:25:33 of AI so that you can understand what it all means for you.
0:25:38 Marketplace is your secret weapon for understanding this economy.
0:25:41 Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:25:48 I want to finish, we’re almost done, I appreciate your time.
0:25:50 I want to finish with The Lightning Round, which is just some quicker, kind of more random,
0:25:55 maybe occasionally silly questions.
0:25:59 Who is one engineer from history who you wish more people knew about?
0:26:05 Boy.
0:26:06 Well, I suppose a lot of people don’t realize, maybe, that Leonardo da Vinci was a very good
0:26:11 engineer.
0:26:12 Very good.
0:26:13 What is some of your favorite engineering work of Leonardo’s?
0:26:16 Well, I mean, he did all kinds of things.
0:26:19 He looked at hearts, he looked at, you know, water flow, I mean, he did a lot, not just
0:26:27 art.
0:26:29 Who is the best teacher you ever had?
0:26:35 Maybe George Shealy at Cornell.
0:26:38 What about him made him such a good teacher?
0:26:40 Well, first he cared a lot and he explained things well, but I think caring a lot, that
0:26:46 means a lot.
0:26:48 You’re also a magician, and I’m curious if there are any skills from close-up magic
0:26:52 that have been helpful to you in your day job.
0:26:56 You know, the one thing that does make a difference with magic is presentation.
0:27:03 So, you know, if you give, so what I learn in magic, if I make a mistake, sometimes
0:27:09 of course you make it deliberately, but if I made a mistake, you know, it’s part of
0:27:17 the show.
0:27:18 You don’t get upset, you just, you know, you just, you just go with the flow.
0:27:23 And what I’d say is if I made a mistake from the talk, same thing, you know, it’s like
0:27:28 you don’t get flustered, you just say, you just keep going.
0:27:31 And that does make a difference.
0:27:34 So your research also helped to create, as I understand it, a line of hair care products
0:27:39 called Living Proof.
0:27:41 Jennifer Aniston, who I will say had great hair before the company started, is involved
0:27:47 in that company.
0:27:49 And so I’m curious, what’s your favorite Living Proof product and are you using it
0:27:53 right now?
0:27:54 Well, so I would say, you know, one of the Living Proof products is called Ph.D. and
0:28:00 stands for Perfect Hair Day.
0:28:02 Oh, Perfect Hair Day, okay.
0:28:04 Are you using it right now?
0:28:06 So I use the shampoos, but gee, my wife and my daughter and lots of people use lots of
0:28:13 the products, but I basically use it in the shampoo.
0:28:17 Very so often when my hair gets longer, I have, you know, just a spray that I put on
0:28:22 that doesn’t make it frizz up so much.
0:28:25 Great.
0:28:26 Is there anything else you think we should talk about?
0:28:29 Well, the only other thing I’d say that we’ve done that we really didn’t touch on is, you
0:28:36 know, we’re doing a lot of work with the Gates Foundation to help the developing world,
0:28:41 you know, and I’m excited about that as well.
0:28:43 I mean, they’ve been a big supporter of our lab and he’s done a terrific job in terms
0:28:49 of helping.
0:28:50 And I think the work is leading to new kinds of nutrition, new kinds of oral delivery that
0:28:58 could last much longer than just a day, can lead, it’s also leading to what we call self-boosting
0:29:04 injections so you wouldn’t have to come back for a second shot.
0:29:07 So I think it’s leading to a lot of things that I hope will someday help a lot of people,
0:29:11 whether, you know, not only in the developing world, but everyone in the world period.
0:29:18 Of those technologies that you just listed, is any one of them particularly, you know,
0:29:23 farther along in development?
0:29:25 Well, several of them are already.
0:29:27 I mean, the pills that you can swallow orally are in that lasts for a week or a month.
0:29:34 They’re in phase three clinical trials.
0:29:36 There’s a company, Lindra, that Geo Traversa and I help start.
0:29:40 That’s probably the most advanced.
0:29:42 Is that for antimalarials or what is the first application there?
0:29:46 Most advanced application is schizophrenia, it’s in phase three trial.
0:29:49 It is in clinical trials for malaria too.
0:29:53 But that’s like in phase one.
0:29:54 So presumably that would be a big deal because drug adherence is always a problem.
0:29:59 People very often don’t take their drugs.
0:30:01 Presumably people who are mentally ill might have more trouble with adherence.
0:30:04 So if you could have a pill once a week instead of every day, that would be a very large improvement.
0:30:08 Yeah, and also once a month, you know, we’ve been working on two, you know,
0:30:12 like a once a month birth control pill and, yeah, so all those things, you know,
0:30:17 that’s moving forward.
0:30:18 Robert Langer is an institute professor at MIT.
0:30:26 Today’s show was produced by Gabriel Hunter-Chang.
0:30:28 It was edited by Lydia Jean Cotte and engineered by Sarah Brugger.
0:30:33 You can email us at problem@pushkin.fm.
0:30:37 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and we’ll be back next week with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
0:30:41 Hey, everybody, I’m Kai Rizdal, the host of Marketplace, your daily download on the economy.
0:30:58 Money influences so much of what we do and how we live.
0:31:02 That’s why it’s essential to understand how this economy works.
0:31:06 At Marketplace, we break down everything from inflation and student loans
0:31:09 to the future of AI so that you can understand what it all means for you.
0:31:14 Marketplace is your secret weapon for understanding this economy.
0:31:17 Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
0:31:19 (upbeat music)
0:00:06 Pushkin.
0:00:06 [MUSIC]
0:00:11 >> Hey everybody, I’m Kai Rizdal, the host of Marketplace,
0:00:13 your daily download on the economy.
0:00:16 Money influences so much of what we do and how we live.
0:00:19 That’s why it’s essential to understand how this economy works.
0:00:23 At Marketplace, we break down everything from inflation and
0:00:26 student loans to the future of AI so that you can understand what it all means for you.
0:00:32 Marketplace is your secret weapon for understanding this economy.
0:00:35 Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:00:37 [MUSIC]
0:00:41 >> You want to start listing off the companies of which you’re a founder and
0:00:44 a co-founder and stop wherever you get tired?
0:00:47 >> I mean, I can try to do that, but that might take some time.
0:00:50 >> Give me a handful.
0:00:52 Count off five on your fingers just for fun.
0:00:55 >> Sure.
0:00:57 Well, Moderna, Momenta, PureTech, Sear, Living Proof.
0:01:03 >> For a sec, I thought you were just going to do the M’s, which might have been a while.
0:01:07 >> I could, I could do with the A’s too.
0:01:11 >> Robert Langer has founded or co-founded something like 40 companies.
0:01:15 He’s an institute professor at MIT, he holds over 1,000 patents, and
0:01:21 his research has been cited more than 400,000 times.
0:01:26 But when he started his career in the 1970s,
0:01:29 he didn’t seem bound for professional glory.
0:01:32 He had a hard time finding a job, he couldn’t get funding for
0:01:35 his research, and his patent applications kept getting rejected.
0:01:39 And I think these two things, his early struggles and
0:01:43 his later massive success, are in fact closely connected.
0:01:48 Langer was trying to do something that was deeply and
0:01:51 profoundly different than what anybody had done before.
0:01:55 Almost nobody understood it.
0:01:57 Almost nobody knew what to do with him.
0:01:59 And then when his work finally did succeed,
0:02:02 it was such a new, powerful discovery that people are still building on it today,
0:02:08 half a century later.
0:02:09 [MUSIC]
0:02:15 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and this is What’s Your Problem.
0:02:17 A show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress.
0:02:22 Robert Langer is still working, still doing research, still founding companies.
0:02:26 And we talked about some of his current work in the later part of our conversation.
0:02:31 But to start, we went back to the mid-1970s,
0:02:34 when Langer got his doctorate in chemical engineering.
0:02:38 And he did something that, at the time, was really unusual.
0:02:42 He did a postdoc with a medical school professor,
0:02:45 a pediatric surgeon named Judah Folkman.
0:02:48 Langer’s field is bioengineering.
0:02:50 Basically, bringing the tools of engineering to the fields of biology and medicine.
0:02:56 And bioengineering is a huge field today.
0:02:59 But it barely existed back when Langer started his postdoc with that doctor,
0:03:04 Judah Folkman.
0:03:06 And bioengineering was exactly what Judah Folkman needed.
0:03:10 Folkman had an idea for a new kind of drug.
0:03:13 And this kind of drug was a molecule that was too big and complex to be given as a pill.
0:03:19 So Folkman needed somebody who could figure out how to deliver this new kind of drug to patients.
0:03:26 As you’ll hear, that delivery problem was fundamentally an engineering problem.
0:03:31 And when Langer solved that problem, he created an entirely new way to get medicine to patients.
0:03:37 And it proved incredibly useful.
0:03:43 Tell me about being an engineer and going off to work in the 1970s in the lab of a physician.
0:03:50 On the one hand, for me, it was very hard because I had to learn a lot about medical things.
0:03:55 And I didn’t know very much biology.
0:03:58 So that was difficult.
0:04:01 But on the other hand, being an engineer, I guess I had a different perspective.
0:04:06 You know, that I didn’t maybe think the same way as a clinician or surgeon or biologist.
0:04:14 You know, engineers, they solved problems.
0:04:16 And Judah Folkman, who was my boss at the time, I mean, that’s what he wanted.
0:04:21 He wanted to see a problem solved.
0:04:23 So let’s talk specifically about that problem.
0:04:26 What did you go to Dr. Folkman’s lab to work on?
0:04:31 Dr. Folkman had this idea that if you could stop blood vessels, you could stop cancer.
0:04:36 It wasn’t — most people didn’t think he was right.
0:04:40 In fact, he went further.
0:04:41 He said that the reason blood vessels come to the tumor is that the tumor makes a chemical signal.
0:04:50 He called the tumor angiogenesis factor.
0:04:53 And he said that was chemically mediated.
0:04:55 And also the idea that he thought about is if that was chemically mediated, maybe stopping
0:05:01 it could also be chemically mediated.
0:05:03 So my job really, in a way, was to prove that he was right because almost everybody told
0:05:09 him he was wrong.
0:05:11 And in so doing, isolate the first, you know, blood vessel or angiogenesis inhibitor.
0:05:17 And so it’s basically that there is this theory that he had that tumors stimulate the growth
0:05:23 of new blood vessels.
0:05:25 And then if that’s true, perhaps you could inhibit the growth of new blood vessels and
0:05:30 thereby inhibit the growth of tumors, right?
0:05:34 And so you get there and I’m interested in that inhibition piece, right?
0:05:39 Because that seems like that’s where you’re really in a very direct way bringing your engineering
0:05:45 skills to bear on this medical problem.
0:05:47 So like talk about that side of it and how you approached it.
0:05:51 But what we wanted to do was have a little nanoparticle or microparticle that could deliver
0:05:56 different molecules.
0:05:58 I was isolating and these were fairly large molecules.
0:06:02 So that was really the idea and then see, could it stop the blood vessels?
0:06:06 So this core idea of developing a nanoparticle to deliver a large molecule, basically a complicated
0:06:14 drug, is an engineering problem, right?
0:06:17 This nanoparticle, it’s like we’ve got this drug, call it, that we think might be able
0:06:22 to stop tumor growth.
0:06:23 But how do we get it to the tumor, right?
0:06:25 That is a basic problem that you are coming up against early in your research.
0:06:30 And that problem winds up being a big deal, right?
0:06:33 And the way you go about solving that problem winds up being a big deal.
0:06:37 So tell me about that.
0:06:40 Well, the nanoparticles and microparticles really it’s taking molecules, drugs and encapsulating
0:06:48 surrounding them with a lipid or a polymer and delivering it to cells or a patient or
0:06:56 an animal.
0:06:57 And a lipid or a polymer is basically some fat or some plastic?
0:07:00 Yeah.
0:07:01 Yeah.
0:07:02 Lipid is some fat and polymer, some plastic, generally speaking.
0:07:07 So yeah, if you just gave the drug by itself and it wasn’t packaged in those particles,
0:07:11 it would just get destroyed.
0:07:13 I mean, so the number one reason you do it is to protect it, you know, otherwise it
0:07:20 won’t, you know, it’ll just get destroyed probably almost immediately.
0:07:25 So you know, we asked people who were experts in that area, Nobel Prize winners and others
0:07:31 who had done work on, or at least helped on delivery of small molecules.
0:07:37 And we asked them about that, but they all told us it wasn’t possible.
0:07:41 So I spent years in the laboratory experimenting, finding hundreds of different ways to failing
0:07:47 hundreds of different times.
0:07:49 But finally I was successful and, you know, we published a paper in Nature in 1976, The
0:07:57 General Nature, and showed for the first time that you could deliver large molecules
0:08:02 this way.
0:08:04 And we published a paper in Science in 1976 showing for the first time that you could
0:08:09 stop blood vessels by using approaches like this.
0:08:12 And as I understand it, even after you published those papers, you met a lot of resistance.
0:08:18 Yeah.
0:08:19 I did.
0:08:20 I suppose I met a lot of resistance for a couple of ways, first different people didn’t
0:08:25 agree with it or didn’t believe it or didn’t think it was possible.
0:08:28 Secondly, my background really wasn’t right, I suppose, for the different review sections.
0:08:35 I was an engineer and when we sent the grants to like the National Institutes of Health
0:08:42 and places like that, you know, they had medical people or biological people reviewing it.
0:08:46 And they said, well, what can an engineer, you know, he doesn’t know anything about
0:08:50 biology or oncology.
0:08:52 Separately, I met a lot of resistance when I tried to do this, get a job in an engineering
0:08:58 department.
0:08:59 They said, well, engineers, the chemical engineering department, they said, engineers really don’t
0:09:04 do experimental biology.
0:09:06 So I didn’t get any faculty positions in the chemical engineering department.
0:09:10 For a very, very long time, I ended up in the nutrition department.
0:09:13 And so, I mean, this idea of bioengineering, that is a big deal now and was very novel
0:09:20 then.
0:09:21 It feels like you’re sort of coming up against this problem of creating a field that doesn’t
0:09:26 quite exist yet or at least creating a part of a field that doesn’t exist yet.
0:09:30 Which seems like on the one hand, the opportunity to solve very large problems was clearly there.
0:09:34 On the other hand, the kind of institutional structure to allow that to happen was not on
0:09:39 your side.
0:09:40 Yeah, you’re right.
0:09:41 I mean, either had been people in chemical engineering doing work on what I’d call mathematical
0:09:47 modeling or transport of molecules.
0:09:50 But experimental stuff, inventing things, yeah, and discovering new molecules, that
0:09:56 certainly had not been done, never been done in chemical engineering up until that time.
0:10:04 So that ended up being hard.
0:10:07 Is it right that some of your early patent applications around this technology were also
0:10:11 rejected?
0:10:12 Yeah, they were.
0:10:13 I mean, the first, the main patent on it got rejected five times in a row, but sometimes
0:10:21 that happens.
0:10:22 I’ve had, after that, I think I had one when we came up with the idea of tissue engineering,
0:10:27 I think that got rejected even more.
0:10:29 So anyhow, those things happen.
0:10:31 And so you get the patents and you end up licensing the technology initially to one
0:10:37 or more big companies, right, big pharmaceutical companies.
0:10:41 What happens with that?
0:10:42 Yeah, well, actually, the hospital did that, the license, because I mean, the patents is
0:10:46 my name, but they licensed it.
0:10:48 You know, well, I was very excited about that.
0:10:52 There were two multi-billion dollar companies, one in animal health, one in human health.
0:10:57 So they gave me a consulting fee.
0:11:00 They gave me actually a very large grant, which for young professors, terrific.
0:11:05 Most importantly, they were going to work on it.
0:11:07 And they did work on it for maybe up to a year, but then they just gave up.
0:11:12 So I got the grant and the consulting fee, but I didn’t get what I wanted most, which
0:11:17 was to see the work that we did make a difference in the world.
0:11:20 Were you surprised when they gave up?
0:11:22 What was your response when they gave up?
0:11:24 I guess I was sad.
0:11:26 I don’t know that I was surprised.
0:11:27 I certainly have seen plenty of places give up before, but it made me sad.
0:11:32 I really thought that this was a way of moving things forward, was having companies take what
0:11:40 you published and put what you did and develop it, but I was mostly sad.
0:11:46 So how do you get from there to starting your first company?
0:11:49 Yeah, well, a good friend of mine, Alex Klebinoff, he was a professor in that nutrition department.
0:11:55 Later he was a professor in the chemistry department at MIT.
0:12:00 He said to me one day after this happened, he said, “Well, Bob, we should start our own
0:12:04 company.”
0:12:05 So I thought, yeah, if you’re not your own champion, nobody else is going to be.
0:12:10 So we did, and I got a number of my students to join that company, and they were very excited
0:12:17 about it.
0:12:18 So that ended up, they weren’t going to give up very easily.
0:12:23 And so you keep working on this original idea of a particle that can deliver a drug, a large
0:12:30 molecule drug basically, and when does it become clear to you that it’s going to work?
0:12:38 Well, actually for me, it was pretty clear it was going to work when we wrote that early
0:12:43 paper of nature.
0:12:44 I mean, I thought I’d see it with my own eyes.
0:12:47 I put certain types of, well, I’m trying to think I explained this, I put certain enzymes,
0:12:51 those are all large molecules in these materials, and I had this test that would turn color
0:12:58 if the enzymes are coming out.
0:13:01 And I’ve got to see it not work many, many times, hundreds of times, but finally I did
0:13:07 see it work.
0:13:08 So I didn’t see how this couldn’t, so since I saw it with my own eyes, but that didn’t
0:13:15 mean that other people were going to necessarily believe it, but I did.
0:13:20 And I had people still 10, 15 years later tell me couldn’t possibly be right.
0:13:26 I mean, very experienced people, but that’s the world.
0:13:30 I mean, a lot of times they’re skepticism.
0:13:33 And what was the first drug from that idea that made it to the market, that made it to
0:13:39 patients?
0:13:40 You know, we had this collaboration with a company called Takeda, it’s a Japanese company,
0:13:46 and they had sent people to our lab every year, and we got a grant from them, and they
0:13:51 created what’s called Lupron Depot, and that ultimately did get approved, and still versions
0:14:00 of it are widely used today.
0:14:02 What kind of patients did that treat?
0:14:04 What did that drug do?
0:14:05 It was a way to treat advanced prostate cancer and endometriosis.
0:14:09 And was it the anti-angiogenesis?
0:14:11 Was it inhibiting the formation of blood vessels, or was it something else?
0:14:15 No, no, it was affecting the hormones.
0:14:17 It was a different hormonal thing.
0:14:19 The angiogenesis ones, they’re, you know, other people use the assays we’ve developed
0:14:27 and other things that we did and things that they did themselves, and they would ultimately
0:14:31 get many drugs approved, but it took many, many years.
0:14:36 That didn’t take place until 2004.
0:14:39 Can you just list off some of the conditions, diseases that are treated with this, you know,
0:14:46 technology and the offshoots of this technology that you came up with?
0:14:49 Well, prostate cancer and endometriosis, I mean, there are treatments for heart diseases,
0:14:54 heart and eye diseases, schizophrenia, opioid addiction, osteoarthritis, diabetes, I mean,
0:15:04 I’m sure I’m leaving out a lot, but those are some.
0:15:10 Still to come on the show?
0:15:11 How Robert Langer wound up creating 40 companies.
0:15:15 Also, the research he’s excited about today.
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0:16:04 That’s V-A-N-T-A.com/special for $1,000 off Vanta.
0:16:09 Hey everybody, I’m Kyle Riznall, the host of Marketplace, your daily download of our
0:16:15 on-the-economy.
0:16:16 Money influences so much of what we do and how we live.
0:16:20 That’s why it’s essential to understand how this economy works.
0:16:24 At Marketplace, we break down everything from inflation and student loans to the future
0:16:28 of AI so that you can understand what it all means for you.
0:16:33 Marketplace is your secret weapon for understanding this economy.
0:16:36 Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:16:42 So after you started that one initial company, you wound up starting or being a co-founder
0:16:48 of a lot of companies.
0:16:50 I don’t have the number in front of me.
0:16:51 Is dozens the right order of magnitude?
0:16:53 Yeah, 40, 40, 41, something like that.
0:16:56 Yeah, like how’s that happen?
0:17:00 How’d that happen?
0:17:01 Well.
0:17:02 It’s a lot of companies.
0:17:03 Yeah, but it’s over close to a 40-year period.
0:17:07 Oh, a company a year seems like a lot to me.
0:17:09 I don’t know.
0:17:10 Yeah.
0:17:11 I have a big lab.
0:17:12 I have a lot of graduate students.
0:17:14 Some of the graduate students would see what I did and both stocks, and they wanted to
0:17:19 start companies.
0:17:20 So we did.
0:17:21 I mean, we may have done work in the lab for five or six years, and then when it got to
0:17:25 a certain stage, we spun it out.
0:17:27 And some people with other people, colleagues of mine, would see that I had done this and
0:17:34 so they’d come to me and talk to me about companies.
0:17:37 So yeah, we kept doing it.
0:17:39 I mean, to me, it’s been a great route for taking discoveries in the academic lab and
0:17:46 getting them out to the world.
0:17:48 And as I mentioned, I had a hard time maybe given the stage of the work to get large companies
0:17:57 that would do it.
0:17:58 So we did it ourselves.
0:18:01 And when you started your first company, I feel like it was much less common for professors
0:18:09 to start companies than it is now.
0:18:11 I’m curious, sort of culturally, you know, within MIT, within academia, what was that
0:18:17 like?
0:18:18 Did you get pushback?
0:18:20 I think anytime money’s involved, a lot of people will tell you, and I think there’s
0:18:25 jealousy about it and people feel you shouldn’t be spending your time doing that even at MIT.
0:18:33 So yeah, I ran into problems when people were thinking about me for promotion.
0:18:41 You know, at one point I had a partial chair and they took that away from me.
0:18:47 So yeah, it was discouraging in the beginning.
0:18:52 In fact, I’d say when I was in the nutrition department, some people told me that the drug
0:18:59 delivery ideas, they would never work and I should be looking for a new job.
0:19:04 You feel like you have gained insight into what that moment is or particular elements
0:19:12 of that moment when you take something that is basic research, academic research, and
0:19:18 decide, okay, this is the moment we’re going to take the leap, we’re going to start a company,
0:19:21 we’re going to try and commercialize it.
0:19:23 How do you know?
0:19:24 Well, I don’t think you ever know for sure, but the kinds of high-level rules that I’ve
0:19:29 used are generally you have what I’ll call as a platform technology, meaning it’s almost
0:19:34 like a plug-and-play thing.
0:19:36 Those drug delivery systems are a good example, right?
0:19:38 You could use it for drug A, drug B, drug C. Then I think the next thing is that you’ve
0:19:46 taken it a certain distance, right?
0:19:48 You have maybe animal data.
0:19:52 You also have a paper, ideally a good journal like, say, Science or Nature.
0:19:58 You have a patent or your high likelihood of getting a patent because you’ve advanced
0:20:02 a certain distance.
0:20:03 Usually, there are people in my lab that want to be involved in it.
0:20:10 Those are the kinds of things that inform my thinking about it.
0:20:17 So what is something right now on the basic research side that you’re excited about?
0:20:24 What is a big idea that is early that you think holds a lot of promise?
0:20:27 Well, I think the tissue engineering work we’re doing holds a lot of promise.
0:20:32 I mean, an example that we’re doing is we’re working with Lee Wei Sai, who’s head of MIT’s
0:20:37 Pick Hour Institute, and I have a wonderful postdoc, Alice Stenton.
0:20:42 We’re actually creating a brain on a chip.
0:20:45 It’s not been published yet, but she’s been able to convert, like say, we could take your
0:20:52 cells and convert it first IPS cells and then convert each of those depending on what we
0:20:57 do to a different brain cell type, six different cell types.
0:21:01 She’s found a matrix that she can put them on and that really makes them grow and function.
0:21:09 So that’s something I’m excited about.
0:21:13 When you say put it on a chip, what does that mean and then what do you do with my brain
0:21:17 on a chip?
0:21:18 Yeah.
0:21:19 Well, what I mean by in a chip, it’s in vitro, it’s not in an animal, it’s not in a person.
0:21:24 What it means is that you could rather, like you could think about if you were going to
0:21:28 do experiment on a person, I mean, of course, there’s a lot you wouldn’t be able to find
0:21:32 out anyhow because we’d have to take you apart and we’re obviously not going to do that.
0:21:36 I appreciate that.
0:21:37 Yeah.
0:21:38 And with animals, you know, it’s a little bit similar here.
0:21:43 So what you do with it is you could literally test thousands and thousands of experiments
0:21:51 and get readouts on them.
0:21:53 So it might someday reduce animal testing, hopefully also reduce human testing and may
0:21:59 greatly speed up drug discovery.
0:22:01 I mean, there’s so many drugs that you’d like to be able to have for brain disease, right?
0:22:06 Like for Alzheimer’s, for Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS for Parkinson’s.
0:22:10 So I hope someday.
0:22:11 Brain disease has been famously difficult to treat with drugs, right?
0:22:15 It’s a very, very hard set of diseases.
0:22:18 Right.
0:22:19 Because we don’t understand it well enough and the tests are very, very hard to do.
0:22:23 So something like this, if it truly ends up working well, you know, could change that
0:22:29 someday.
0:22:30 But that’s an example of something I’m excited about.
0:22:33 As you said, it’s like, it’s a platform, right?
0:22:35 Presumably, if you could do brain cells, you could do different kinds of cells, it could
0:22:38 be a way to do lots of testing.
0:22:41 Well, we’ve done, yeah, well, we’ve put, in this case, we have six different brain cell
0:22:45 types in vitro.
0:22:47 We have, are working on other cell types too.
0:22:50 We have a gastrointestinal tract on a chip.
0:22:52 We’ve had a heart on a chip.
0:22:54 And of course, it’s not just putting them on chips.
0:22:56 Someday, you could use it for repairing tissues, you know, you could maybe, I mean, in fact,
0:23:02 Laura Nicholson, one of my former postdocs, she runs a company that’s making new blood
0:23:07 vessels that’s been used on patients in the Ukraine.
0:23:10 Others have used made artificial skin for burn victims or patients with diabetic skin
0:23:15 ulcers.
0:23:16 And people are trying to make new cartilage, all kinds of tissues.
0:23:20 So, yeah, so that’s, that is a big, you know, that’s an exciting area.
0:23:25 And that tissue engineering side, I mean, does that go back to a kind of similar origin
0:23:30 story, right?
0:23:31 I know there was sort of early tissue engineering work that you did as well.
0:23:34 What was that work?
0:23:35 Yeah.
0:23:36 Well, they are, one of the people I got to meet at Children’s Hospital was Jay Vakante.
0:23:40 He was a pediatric surgeon, still is.
0:23:43 And he was treating patients with liver failure.
0:23:46 And one day he came to see me, he said, “Bob, you know, I do all these transplants, would
0:23:51 it ever be possible to make a liver from scratch?”
0:23:54 And he and I brainstormed and came up with a way that we hope might do that with polymer
0:24:02 scaffolds and cells.
0:24:05 And so we’ve continued on working together and separately and different ways to make
0:24:09 this happen.
0:24:11 But that started probably over 40 years ago, and that certainly was the basis for a lot
0:24:18 of these things.
0:24:19 So we can’t synthesize livers yet, but what are some of the clinical applications that
0:24:24 have been found to some of the research you did there?
0:24:27 Well, you can make artificial skin for burn victims, you, it looks like we’ll be able
0:24:31 to make blood vessels.
0:24:32 I mean, there have been clinical trials on a variety of things ranging from new spinal
0:24:38 cord repair, to hearing loss, you know, a lot of different things.
0:24:43 But I think ultimately it’s unlimited, you know, and you could theoretically use approaches
0:24:48 like this if you understand the right cells, the right signals, the right biology and the
0:24:53 right engineering.
0:24:54 I don’t see that there’s necessarily any limit to what you could use it for.
0:24:58 But people, we need to understand it more.
0:25:04 We’ll be back in a minute with The Lightning Round.
0:25:16 Hey everybody, I’m Kai Rizdal, the host of Marketplace, your daily download on the economy.
0:25:22 Money influences so much of what we do and how we live.
0:25:26 That’s why it’s essential to understand how this economy works.
0:25:29 At Marketplace, we break down everything from inflation and student loans to the future
0:25:33 of AI so that you can understand what it all means for you.
0:25:38 Marketplace is your secret weapon for understanding this economy.
0:25:41 Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:25:48 I want to finish, we’re almost done, I appreciate your time.
0:25:50 I want to finish with The Lightning Round, which is just some quicker, kind of more random,
0:25:55 maybe occasionally silly questions.
0:25:59 Who is one engineer from history who you wish more people knew about?
0:26:05 Boy.
0:26:06 Well, I suppose a lot of people don’t realize, maybe, that Leonardo da Vinci was a very good
0:26:11 engineer.
0:26:12 Very good.
0:26:13 What is some of your favorite engineering work of Leonardo’s?
0:26:16 Well, I mean, he did all kinds of things.
0:26:19 He looked at hearts, he looked at, you know, water flow, I mean, he did a lot, not just
0:26:27 art.
0:26:29 Who is the best teacher you ever had?
0:26:35 Maybe George Shealy at Cornell.
0:26:38 What about him made him such a good teacher?
0:26:40 Well, first he cared a lot and he explained things well, but I think caring a lot, that
0:26:46 means a lot.
0:26:48 You’re also a magician, and I’m curious if there are any skills from close-up magic
0:26:52 that have been helpful to you in your day job.
0:26:56 You know, the one thing that does make a difference with magic is presentation.
0:27:03 So, you know, if you give, so what I learn in magic, if I make a mistake, sometimes
0:27:09 of course you make it deliberately, but if I made a mistake, you know, it’s part of
0:27:17 the show.
0:27:18 You don’t get upset, you just, you know, you just, you just go with the flow.
0:27:23 And what I’d say is if I made a mistake from the talk, same thing, you know, it’s like
0:27:28 you don’t get flustered, you just say, you just keep going.
0:27:31 And that does make a difference.
0:27:34 So your research also helped to create, as I understand it, a line of hair care products
0:27:39 called Living Proof.
0:27:41 Jennifer Aniston, who I will say had great hair before the company started, is involved
0:27:47 in that company.
0:27:49 And so I’m curious, what’s your favorite Living Proof product and are you using it
0:27:53 right now?
0:27:54 Well, so I would say, you know, one of the Living Proof products is called Ph.D. and
0:28:00 stands for Perfect Hair Day.
0:28:02 Oh, Perfect Hair Day, okay.
0:28:04 Are you using it right now?
0:28:06 So I use the shampoos, but gee, my wife and my daughter and lots of people use lots of
0:28:13 the products, but I basically use it in the shampoo.
0:28:17 Very so often when my hair gets longer, I have, you know, just a spray that I put on
0:28:22 that doesn’t make it frizz up so much.
0:28:25 Great.
0:28:26 Is there anything else you think we should talk about?
0:28:29 Well, the only other thing I’d say that we’ve done that we really didn’t touch on is, you
0:28:36 know, we’re doing a lot of work with the Gates Foundation to help the developing world,
0:28:41 you know, and I’m excited about that as well.
0:28:43 I mean, they’ve been a big supporter of our lab and he’s done a terrific job in terms
0:28:49 of helping.
0:28:50 And I think the work is leading to new kinds of nutrition, new kinds of oral delivery that
0:28:58 could last much longer than just a day, can lead, it’s also leading to what we call self-boosting
0:29:04 injections so you wouldn’t have to come back for a second shot.
0:29:07 So I think it’s leading to a lot of things that I hope will someday help a lot of people,
0:29:11 whether, you know, not only in the developing world, but everyone in the world period.
0:29:18 Of those technologies that you just listed, is any one of them particularly, you know,
0:29:23 farther along in development?
0:29:25 Well, several of them are already.
0:29:27 I mean, the pills that you can swallow orally are in that lasts for a week or a month.
0:29:34 They’re in phase three clinical trials.
0:29:36 There’s a company, Lindra, that Geo Traversa and I help start.
0:29:40 That’s probably the most advanced.
0:29:42 Is that for antimalarials or what is the first application there?
0:29:46 Most advanced application is schizophrenia, it’s in phase three trial.
0:29:49 It is in clinical trials for malaria too.
0:29:53 But that’s like in phase one.
0:29:54 So presumably that would be a big deal because drug adherence is always a problem.
0:29:59 People very often don’t take their drugs.
0:30:01 Presumably people who are mentally ill might have more trouble with adherence.
0:30:04 So if you could have a pill once a week instead of every day, that would be a very large improvement.
0:30:08 Yeah, and also once a month, you know, we’ve been working on two, you know,
0:30:12 like a once a month birth control pill and, yeah, so all those things, you know,
0:30:17 that’s moving forward.
0:30:18 Robert Langer is an institute professor at MIT.
0:30:26 Today’s show was produced by Gabriel Hunter-Chang.
0:30:28 It was edited by Lydia Jean Cotte and engineered by Sarah Brugger.
0:30:33 You can email us at problem@pushkin.fm.
0:30:37 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and we’ll be back next week with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
0:30:41 Hey, everybody, I’m Kai Rizdal, the host of Marketplace, your daily download on the economy.
0:30:58 Money influences so much of what we do and how we live.
0:31:02 That’s why it’s essential to understand how this economy works.
0:31:06 At Marketplace, we break down everything from inflation and student loans
0:31:09 to the future of AI so that you can understand what it all means for you.
0:31:14 Marketplace is your secret weapon for understanding this economy.
0:31:17 Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
0:31:19 (upbeat music)
Robert Langer has co-founded dozens of companies, holds over a thousand patents, and is a pioneering figure in drug delivery and tissue engineering. Robert has solved a lot of problems, and is working on many more with his lab at MIT. But there is one big problem that has stuck with Robert his whole career: How do you get discoveries out of the lab and into the world?
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