edison

The Edison of Medicine

One morning last year, James Dahlman came to Bob Langer’s office at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research to say good-bye. He was meeting with Langer and Dan Anderson—his doctoral advisers. The 29-year-old was about to take up his first faculty position, in the biomedical engineering department at Georgia Tech, and he wanted their advice.

“Do something that’s big,” Langer told him. “Do something that really can change the world rather than something incremental.”

These were not just inspirational words for a former student. They are the watchcry that has guided Langer, a chemical engineer and a pioneer in the fields of controlled-release drug delivery and tissue engineering, throughout his four-decade career at MIT. And they are part of the formula that has made Langer Lab one of the most productive research facilities in the world.

Academic, corporate, and government labs—indeed, anyone leading a group of highly talented people from disparate fields—could learn much from Langer’s model. He has a five-pronged approach to accelerating the pace of discoveries and ensuring that they make it out of academia and into the real world as products. It includes a focus on high-impact ideas, a process for crossing the proverbial “valley of death” between research and commercial development, methods for facilitating multidisciplinary collaboration, ways to make the constant turnover of researchers and the limited duration of project funding a plus, and a leadership style that balances freedom and support.

The United States alone spends roughly $500 billion a year on research, but “much of that is mundane,” says H. Kent Bowen, an emeritus professor at Harvard Business School who has spent years studying academic and corporate labs. “If there were more highly collaborative, Langer-like labs that focused on high-impact research, the United States would realize its enormous potential for creating wealth.”

Langer’s achievements are remarkable on several counts. His h-index score, a measure of the number of a scholar’s published papers and how often they have been cited, is 230—the highest of any engineer ever. His more than 1,100 current and pending patents have been licensed or sublicensed to some 300 pharmaceutical, chemical, biotechnology, and medical device companies, earning him the nickname “the Edison of medicine.” Alone or in collaboration, his lab has given rise to 40 companies, all but one of which are still in existence, either as independent entities or as part of acquiring companies. Collectively, they have an estimated market value of more than $23 billion—excluding Living Proof, a hair products company that Unilever is acquiring for an undisclosed sum.

A final “product” of the lab is people: Scores of the roughly 900 researchers who have earned graduate degrees or worked as postdocs at the lab have gone on to distinguished careers in academia, business, and venture capital. Fourteen have been inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, 12 into the National Academy of Medicine.

Langer's Office at MIT

LANGER’S OFFICE AT MIT’S KOCH INSTITUTE

A BULLETIN BOARD IN THE LAB’S BREAK ROOM

The multidisciplinary approach is still a work in progress in academia, but it has been gathering steam there over the past decade or so, reflecting universities’ growing interest in tackling real-world problems and spawning new businesses and a recognition that doing so often takes diverse expertise. Although it has long been common in the business world, companies too could improve their results by applying elements of Langer’s research-to-product process, thereby creating brand-new offerings and refreshing or reinventing their businesses again and again.

Focus on High-Impact Problems

One of Langer’s mantras when choosing projects is: Consider the potential impact on society, not the money. The idea is that if you create something that makes a major difference, the customers and the money will come. It’s a profound departure from the approach of many big companies: If an idea for a product is so radically new that discounted cash flow can’t be calculated, they often won’t pursue it, or they give up when the research hits an obstacle—as ambitious research almost always does.

To Langer, “impact” means the number of people an invention could help. The life sciences enterprises that have emerged from his lab have the potential to touch nearly 4.7 billion lives, according to Polaris Partners, a venture capital firm that has financed many of them. For example, one of the lab’s products, on the market since 1996, is a wafer that can be implanted in the brain to deliver chemotherapy directly to the site of a glioblastoma. Another, recently handed over to a new company—Sigilon, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts—is a potential cure for type 1 diabetes, developed in concert with researchers at other universities: Encasing beta cells in a polymer, the researchers have shown, can protect them from the body’s immune system yet allow them to detect the level of sugar in the blood and release the appropriate amounts of insulin.

With such concrete, ambitious projects on the lab’s docket, the customers have indeed come: foundations, companies, scientists in other labs, and government agencies including the National Institutes of Health. Foundations and companies currently fund 63% of the lab’s $17.3 million annual budget; they range from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Prostate Cancer Foundation to Novo Nordisk and Hoffmann-La Roche. “A key reason we decided to work with Bob was his lab’s track record in controlled delivery,” says Dan Hartman, the director of integrated development and malaria at the Gates Foundation and the chief liaison between the foundation and the lab. “Bob and his team’s creativity and technical expertise cannot be overemphasized.”