Page 203 - HBR's 10 Must Reads 20180 - The Definitive Management Ideas of the Year from Harvard Business Review

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tifying candidates from cartilage, which has no blood supply (Langer got cow
bones from a slaughterhouse) and inventing polymer systems that could de-
liver large molecules over time. Angiogenesis inhibitors ultimately became
instrumental in treating a number of cancers, and polymers have become an
important way to deliver drugs and vaccines and to help grow new body tis-
sue, including skin, cartilage, and spinal cord.
Langer returned to MIT in 1977 as an assistant professor, initially in the De-
partment of Nutrition and Food Science (because no chemical engineering
department at a university would hire him). It gave him tremendous freedom,
and he continued working on drug delivery, angiogenesis inhibitors, and tis-
sue engineering, obtaining funding from companies when his ideas proved
too radical for government grants. Many senior faculty members of the de-
partment didn’t believe in his ideas and suggested that he look for a new
job. However, by the mid-1980s his discoveries, publications, and start-ups
began winning recognition. One of MIT’s 13 Institute Professors, Langer is a
member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine,
and a recipient of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the Na-
tional Medal of Science, the Charles Stark Draper Prize, and the Queen Eliza-
beth Prize for Engineering.

novel molecular tests for the early detection of colon cancer. When
he contacted Langer, he was finishing an internal medicine resi-
dency at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and trying to fig-
ure out what to do with a gastroenterology fellowship he had landed
at Massachusetts General Hospital. He told Langer that although he
was interested in developing systems for delivering drugs in the GI
tract, he was not an engineer. Langer hired him anyway.
The bet paid off. Traverso demonstrated the concept of several
different approaches to delivering drugs through devices in the GI
tract. The Gates Foundation saw that the work might solve prob-
lems it wanted to address in poor countries and provided signifi-
cant funding. Grants also came in from Novo Nordisk (to develop
microneedles for internal injections), the Charles Stark Draper Lab
(for new ingestible systems), and Hoffmann-La Roche (for the deliv-
ery of a new class of drugs).

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