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How to Start 40 Companies (and Counting) · What's Your Problem?

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. You want to start listing off the companies of
0:22
Speaker 1: which you're a founder and a co founder and stop
0:24
Speaker 1: wherever you get tired.
0:26
Speaker 2: I mean I can try to do that, but that
0:28
Speaker 2: might take some time.
0:30
Speaker 1: Give me a handful. Count count off five on your fingers,
0:33
Speaker 1: just for sure.
0:34
Speaker 2: Sure, well, Maderna Momenta PureTech Seer, living Proof.
0:42
Speaker 1: For a second thought, you were just going to do
0:44
Speaker 1: the MS, which might have been.
0:45
Speaker 2: A while I could, I could do with the aged.
0:50
Speaker 1: Robert Langer has founded or co founded something like forty companies.
0:54
Speaker 1: He is an institute professor at MIT. He holds over
0:58
Speaker 1: a thousand patents, and his research has been cited more
1:01
Speaker 1: than four hundred thousand times. But when he started his
1:06
Speaker 1: career in the nineteen seventies, he didn't see bound for
1:09
Speaker 1: professional glory. He had a hard time finding a job,
1:13
Speaker 1: he couldn't get funding for his research, and his patent
1:16
Speaker 1: applications kept getting rejected. And I think these two things,
1:21
Speaker 1: his early struggles and his later massive success are in
1:25
Speaker 1: fact closely connected. Langer was trying to do something that
1:29
Speaker 1: was deeply and profoundly different than what anybody had done before.
1:33
Speaker 1: Almost nobody understood it. Almost nobody knew what to do
1:37
Speaker 1: with him, and then when his work finally did succeed,
1:41
Speaker 1: it was such a new, powerful discovery that people are
1:45
Speaker 1: still building on it today half a century later. I'm
1:54
Speaker 1: Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem, the show
1:56
Speaker 1: where I talk to people who are trying to make
1:59
Speaker 1: technological progress. Robert Langer is still working, still doing research,
2:04
Speaker 1: still founding companies, and we talked about some of his
2:07
Speaker 1: current work in the later part of our conversation. But
2:10
Speaker 1: to start, we went back to the mid nineteen seventies
2:13
Speaker 1: when Langer got his doctorate in chemical engineering and he
2:17
Speaker 1: did something that at the time was really unusual. He
2:21
Speaker 1: did a postdoc with a medical school professor, a pediatric
2:24
Speaker 1: surgeon named Judah Folkman. Langer's field is bioengineering, basically bringing
2:30
Speaker 1: the tools of engineering to the fields of biology and medicine.
2:35
Speaker 1: And bioengineering is a huge field today, but it barely
2:39
Speaker 1: existed back when Langer started his postdoc with that doctor,
2:43
Speaker 1: Judah Folkman, and bioengineering was exactly what Judah Foalkman needed.
2:49
Speaker 1: Folkman had an idea for a new kind of drug,
2:52
Speaker 1: and this kind of drug was a molecule that was
2:54
Speaker 1: too big and complex to be given as a pill.
2:58
Speaker 1: So Folkman needed somebody who could figure out how to
3:01
Speaker 1: deliver this new kind of drug to patience. As you'll hear,
3:05
Speaker 1: that delivery problem was fundamentally an engineering problem, and when
3:10
Speaker 1: Langer solved that problem, he created an entirely new way
3:14
Speaker 1: to get medicine to patients, and it proved incredibly useful.
3:22
Speaker 1: Tell me about being an engineer and going off to
3:24
Speaker 1: work in the nineteen seventies in the lab of a physician.
3:29
Speaker 2: On the one hand, for me, it was very hard
3:31
Speaker 2: because I had to learn a lot about medical things
3:34
Speaker 2: and I didn't know very much biology, so that was
3:39
Speaker 2: that was difficult. But on the other hand, being an engineer,
3:43
Speaker 2: I guess I had a different perspective, you know that
3:46
Speaker 2: I didn't maybe think the same way as a clinician
3:51
Speaker 2: or surgeon or a biologist. You know, engineers they solve problems,
3:55
Speaker 2: and that Judah Falkman, who was my boss at the time,
3:58
Speaker 2: I mean, that's what he wanted. He wanted to see
4:01
Speaker 2: a problem solved.
4:02
Speaker 1: So let's talk specifically about that problem. What did you
4:06
Speaker 1: what did you go to doctor Falkman's lab to work on.
4:09
Speaker 2: Doctor Fokeland had this idea that if you could stop
4:12
Speaker 2: blood vessels, you could stop cancer. It wasn't most people
4:17
Speaker 2: didn't think he was right. In fact, he went further.
4:20
Speaker 2: He said that the reason blood vessels come to the
4:24
Speaker 2: tumor is that the tumor makes a chemical signal he
4:29
Speaker 2: called the tumor antigenesis factor, and he said that was
4:32
Speaker 2: chemically mediated. And also the idea that he thought about
4:37
Speaker 2: is if that was chemically mediated, maybe stopping it could
4:40
Speaker 2: also be chemically mediated. So my job really, in a
4:45
Speaker 2: way was to prove that he was right, because almost
4:47
Speaker 2: everybody told him he was wrong, and in so doing
4:50
Speaker 2: isolate the first you know, blood vessel or antiogenesis inhibitor,
4:55
Speaker 2: uh huh.
4:56
Speaker 1: And so it's basically that there is this theory that
4:59
Speaker 1: he had that tumors stimulate the growth of new blood vessels,
5:04
Speaker 1: and then if that's true, perhaps you could inhibit the
5:07
Speaker 1: growth of new blood vessels thereby inhibit the growth of tumors. Right,
5:13
Speaker 1: And so you get there, and I'm interested in that
5:17
Speaker 1: inhibition piece, right, because that seems like that's where you're really,
5:20
Speaker 1: in a very direct way, bringing your engineering skills to
5:25
Speaker 1: bear on this medical problem. So, like, talk about that
5:27
Speaker 1: side of it and how you approached it.
5:30
Speaker 2: So what we wanted to do was have a little
5:32
Speaker 2: nanoparticle or microparticle that could deliver different molecules I was isolating,
5:39
Speaker 2: and these were fairly large molecules, so that was really
5:42
Speaker 2: the idea, and then see could it stop the blood vessels?
5:45
Speaker 1: So this core idea of developing a nanoparticle to deliver
5:50
Speaker 1: a large molecule basically a complicated drug, is an engineering problem, right,
5:56
Speaker 1: this nanopart of It's like, we've got this this drug
5:59
Speaker 1: call it that we think might be able to stop
6:01
Speaker 1: tumor growth, but how do we get it to the tumor? Right?
6:04
Speaker 1: That is a basic problem that you were coming up
6:07
Speaker 1: against early in your research, and that that problem winds
6:11
Speaker 1: up being a big deal, right, and the way you
6:13
Speaker 1: go about solving that problem winds up being a big deal.
6:16
Speaker 1: So tell me about that.
6:19
Speaker 2: Well, the nanoparticles and microparticles, really it's taking molecules drugs, encapsulating,
6:27
Speaker 2: surrounding them with a lipid or polymer, and delivering it
6:32
Speaker 2: to sells or a patient or an animal.
6:36
Speaker 1: And a lipid or a polymer is basically some fat
6:38
Speaker 1: or some plastic.
6:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, lipid is some fat and polymer some plastic.
6:43
Speaker 2: Generally speaking, So, yeah, if you escape the drug by
6:48
Speaker 2: itself and it wasn't packaged in those particles, it would
6:51
Speaker 2: just get destroyed. I mean, so the number one reason
6:56
Speaker 2: you do it is to protect it, you know, otherwise
6:59
Speaker 2: it won't you know, they'll just get destroyed, probably almost immediately.
7:03
Speaker 2: So you know, we ask people who are experts in
7:07
Speaker 2: that area, know about price winners and others who had
7:10
Speaker 2: done work or at least helped on delivery of small molecules,
7:16
Speaker 2: and we asked them about that, but they all told
7:18
Speaker 2: us it wasn't possible. So I spent years in the
7:22
Speaker 2: laboratory experimenting, finding hundreds of different ways, failing hundreds at
7:27
Speaker 2: different times, but finally I was successful. And you know,
7:32
Speaker 2: we published a paper in Nature in nineteen seventy six,
7:36
Speaker 2: the General Nature, and showed for the first time that
7:40
Speaker 2: you could deliver large molecules this way. And we published
7:43
Speaker 2: a paper in Science in nineteen seventy six showing for
7:46
Speaker 2: the first time that you could stop blood vessels by
7:49
Speaker 2: using approaches like this.
7:51
Speaker 1: And as I understand it, even after you published those papers,
7:55
Speaker 1: you met a lot of resistance.
7:57
Speaker 2: Yeah I did. I suppose I met a lot of
8:00
Speaker 2: resistance for a couple of ways. First, different people didn't
8:04
Speaker 2: agree with it or didn't believe it or didn't think
8:06
Speaker 2: it was possible. Secondly, my background really wasn't right. I
8:11
Speaker 2: suppose for the different review sections, I was an engineer,
8:15
Speaker 2: and when we sent the grants to the National Insituites
8:20
Speaker 2: of Health in places like that, you know, they had
8:23
Speaker 2: medical people or biological people reviewing it, and they said, well,
8:26
Speaker 2: what can an engineer, You know, he doesn't know anything
8:28
Speaker 2: about biology or oncology. Separately, I met a lot of
8:33
Speaker 2: resistance when I tried to do this get a job
8:36
Speaker 2: in an engineering department. They said, well, engineers a chemical
8:40
Speaker 2: engineering department, They said, engineers really don't do experimental biology.
8:44
Speaker 2: So I didn't get any faculty positions in a chemical
8:48
Speaker 2: engineering department for a very very long time. I ended
8:51
Speaker 2: up in an fishing department.
8:52
Speaker 1: And so, I mean, this idea of bioengineering that is
8:57
Speaker 1: a big deal now and was very novel. Then it
9:00
Speaker 1: feels like you're sort of coming up against this problem
9:02
Speaker 1: of creating a field that doesn't quite exist yet, or
9:06
Speaker 1: at least creating a part of a field that doesn't
9:08
Speaker 1: exist yet, which seems like, on the one hand, the
9:10
Speaker 1: opportunity to solve very large problems was clearly there. On
9:13
Speaker 1: the other hand, the kind of institutional structure to allow
9:16
Speaker 1: that to happen was was not on your side.
9:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're right. I mean, Ei there had been people
9:22
Speaker 2: in chemical engineering doing work on what i'd call mathematical modeling,
9:27
Speaker 2: you know, transport of molecules, but experimental stuff, inventing things. Yeah,
9:31
Speaker 2: that and discovering you know, new molecules that certainly had
9:36
Speaker 2: not been done, never been done in chemical engineering up
9:40
Speaker 2: till that time. So so that ended up being hard.
9:46
Speaker 1: Is it right that some of your early patent applications
9:48
Speaker 1: around this technology were also rejected?
9:51
Speaker 2: Yeah they were. I mean the first the main patent
9:55
Speaker 2: on it got rejected five times in a row. But
9:59
Speaker 2: you know, sometimes that happens. I'vet after that. I think
10:03
Speaker 2: I had one when we came up with the idea
10:05
Speaker 2: of tissue engineering. I think that got rejected even more.
10:08
Speaker 2: So those things happen.
10:10
Speaker 1: And so you get the patents and you end up
10:13
Speaker 1: licensing the technology initially to one or more big big companies, right,
10:18
Speaker 1: big pharmaceutical company. What happens with that?
10:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, actually the hospital did that the license because
10:24
Speaker 2: I mean, the past is my name, but they licensed it,
10:27
Speaker 2: you know. I well, I was very excited about that.
10:30
Speaker 2: There were two multi billion dollar companies won an animal
10:34
Speaker 2: health one in human health. You know, So they they
10:37
Speaker 2: gave me a consulting fee. They gave me actually a
10:40
Speaker 2: very large grant, which for young professors, you know, terrific.
10:44
Speaker 2: Most importantly, they were going to work on it, and
10:46
Speaker 2: they did work on it for maybe up to a year,
10:49
Speaker 2: but then they just gave up. So I got the
10:52
Speaker 2: grant and the consulting fee, but I didn't get what
10:54
Speaker 2: I wanted most, which was to see the work that
10:57
Speaker 2: we did make a difference in the world.
10:59
Speaker 1: Were you surprised when they gave up? What was your
11:01
Speaker 1: response when they gave up?
11:03
Speaker 2: I guess I was sad. I don't know that I
11:05
Speaker 2: was surprised. I certainly have seen plenty of places give
11:09
Speaker 2: up before, but it made me sad. I really thought
11:12
Speaker 2: that this was a way of moving things forward, was
11:17
Speaker 2: having companies, you know, take what you published and what
11:21
Speaker 2: you did and develop it. But I was mostly sad.
11:25
Speaker 1: So how do you get from there to starting your
11:27
Speaker 1: first company?
11:29
Speaker 2: Yeah? Well, a good friend of mine, Alex kleebman Off,
11:31
Speaker 2: he was a professor in that nutrition department lady. He
11:35
Speaker 2: was a professor in the chemistry department and mit he
11:39
Speaker 2: said to me one day after this happened, he said, well, Bob,
11:42
Speaker 2: we should start our own company. So I thought, yeah,
11:46
Speaker 2: if you're not your own champion, nobody else is going
11:48
Speaker 2: to be. So we did, and I got a number
11:52
Speaker 2: of my students to join that company, and they were
11:55
Speaker 2: very excited about it, so that that ended up. You know,
11:59
Speaker 2: they weren't going to give up very easily.
12:02
Speaker 1: And so you keep working on this original idea of
12:06
Speaker 1: a particle that can deliver a drug, a large molecule
12:10
Speaker 1: drug basically, and when does it become clear to you
12:15
Speaker 1: that it's going to work.
12:17
Speaker 2: Well, actually, for me, I was pretty clear it was
12:20
Speaker 2: going to work when we wrote that.
12:21
Speaker 1: Early paper in Nature.
12:23
Speaker 2: I mean I thought i'd see it with my own eyes.
12:25
Speaker 2: I put certain types of well I'm trying to think,
12:28
Speaker 2: I explained. I put certain enzymes. Those are all large
12:31
Speaker 2: molecules in these materials, and I had this test that
12:36
Speaker 2: would turn color if the enzymes are coming out, and
12:40
Speaker 2: I've got to see it not work many many, many times,
12:43
Speaker 2: hundreds of times. But finally I did see it work,
12:46
Speaker 2: and so I didn't see how this couldn't you know,
12:51
Speaker 2: so since I saw it with my own eyes, but
12:53
Speaker 2: that didn't mean that other people were going to necessarily
12:56
Speaker 2: believe it. But I did, and you know I had
13:00
Speaker 2: people still ten fifteen years later tell me couldn't possibly
13:04
Speaker 2: be right. I mean, very experienced people. But you know
13:08
Speaker 2: that's the world. I mean a lot of times they're skepticism.
13:11
Speaker 1: And what was the first drug from that idea that
13:15
Speaker 1: made it to the market, that made it to patients.
13:19
Speaker 2: You know, we had this collaboration with a company called
13:22
Speaker 2: Taketa as a Japanese company, and they had sent people
13:26
Speaker 2: to our lab every year and we got a grants
13:28
Speaker 2: from them, and they created what's called lupron depot and
13:33
Speaker 2: that was that ultimately did get approved and still versions
13:39
Speaker 2: of it are widely used today.
13:41
Speaker 1: What kind of patients did that treat? What did that
13:43
Speaker 1: drug do?
13:44
Speaker 2: It was a way to treat advanced prostate cancer and endometriosis.
13:48
Speaker 1: And was it the anti angiogenesis? Was it inhibiting the
13:51
Speaker 1: formation of blood vessels or was it.
13:53
Speaker 2: Something you no, No, it was it was affecting hormones.
13:56
Speaker 2: It was a different hormonal thing, the antiogenesis ones that
14:01
Speaker 2: there you know, other people used the essays we've developed
14:06
Speaker 2: and other things that we did and things that they
14:08
Speaker 2: did themselves, and they would ultimately get many drugs approved,
14:13
Speaker 2: but it took many, many years. That didn't take place
14:16
Speaker 2: till two thousand and four.
14:18
Speaker 1: Can you just list off some of the conditions diseases
14:22
Speaker 1: that are treated with this, you know, technology, and the
14:25
Speaker 1: offshoots of this technology that you came.
14:27
Speaker 2: Up with, well, prostate cancer and ametriosis. I mean, there
14:31
Speaker 2: are treatments for heart diseases, different eye diseases, schizophrenia, opioid addiction, osteoarthritis, diabetes.
14:42
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm sure I'm leaving all out a lot,
14:45
Speaker 2: but those are some.
14:49
Speaker 1: Still to come on the show. How Robert Langer wound
14:51
Speaker 1: up creating forty companies also the research he's excited about today.
15:09
Speaker 1: So after you started that one initial company, you wound
15:13
Speaker 1: up starting or being a co founder of a lot
15:16
Speaker 1: of companies. I don't have the number in front of you.
15:18
Speaker 1: It's dozens, the right order of magnitude.
15:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, forty forty forty one.
15:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like, how's that happen? Like? What how'd that happen? Well,
15:28
Speaker 1: it's a lot of companies.
15:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's over it's over close to a forty
15:32
Speaker 2: year period.
15:33
Speaker 1: Well a company a year seems like a lot time.
15:36
Speaker 1: I don't know.
15:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I mean I have a big lab, I
15:39
Speaker 2: have a lot of graduate students. Some of the graduate
15:41
Speaker 2: students would see what I did and bostocks and they
15:45
Speaker 2: wanted to start companies. So we did. I mean, you know,
15:47
Speaker 2: we may have done work in the lab for five
15:49
Speaker 2: or six years, and then when it got to a
15:51
Speaker 2: certain stage, we spun it out and some people with
15:54
Speaker 2: other people, colleagues of mine, would see that, you know,
16:00
Speaker 2: I had done this, and so they'd come to me
16:01
Speaker 2: and talked to me about companies. So I you know, so, yeah,
16:05
Speaker 2: we kept doing it. I mean, to me, it's it's
16:07
Speaker 2: been a great route for taking discoveries in the academic
16:11
Speaker 2: lab and getting them out to the world. You know.
16:15
Speaker 2: And as I mentioned, I had a hard time, maybe
16:20
Speaker 2: given the stage of the work, to get large companies
16:23
Speaker 2: that would do it. So we did it ourselves.
16:27
Speaker 1: And when you started your first company, I feel like
16:31
Speaker 1: it was much less common for professors to start companies
16:36
Speaker 1: than it is now. I'm curious sort of culturally, you know,
16:40
Speaker 1: within MIT, within academia, how what was that like? Did
16:44
Speaker 1: you get pushback.
16:46
Speaker 2: I think anytime money's involved, a lot of people will
16:49
Speaker 2: tell you and I think there's jealousy, you know, about it,
16:53
Speaker 2: and people feel you shouldn't be spending your time doing that,
16:58
Speaker 2: even at an MIT. So yeah, I had I ran
17:02
Speaker 2: into problems when people were thinking about me for promotion.
17:07
Speaker 2: You know, some one point I had a partial share
17:11
Speaker 2: and they took that away from me. So yeah, I
17:15
Speaker 2: was discouraging in the beginning. In fact, I'd say when
17:20
Speaker 2: I was in the nutrition department, a lot of people,
17:23
Speaker 2: some people told me that the drug delivery ideas they
17:26
Speaker 2: would never work and I should be looking for a
17:28
Speaker 2: new job.
17:30
Speaker 1: Do you feel like you have have gained insight into
17:35
Speaker 1: what that moment is or particular elements of that moment
17:39
Speaker 1: when you take something that is basic research, academic research
17:44
Speaker 1: and decide, okay, this is the moment we're going to
17:46
Speaker 1: take the leap. We're going to start a company, We're
17:48
Speaker 1: going to try and commercialize it. How do you know?
17:51
Speaker 2: Well, I don't think you ever know for sure, but
17:53
Speaker 2: the kinds of high level rules that I've used are
17:57
Speaker 2: generally you have what I'll call is a platform technology,
18:00
Speaker 2: meaning it's almost like a plug and play thing. Those
18:02
Speaker 2: drug delivery systems are a good example, right, you could
18:05
Speaker 2: use it for drug A, drug BA, DRUGSY. Then I
18:10
Speaker 2: think the next thing is that you've taken at a
18:13
Speaker 2: certain distance. Right, you have maybe animal data. You also
18:19
Speaker 2: have a paper and ideally a good journal like say
18:23
Speaker 2: Science or Nature. You have a patent or your high
18:26
Speaker 2: likelihood of getting a patent because you've advanced a certain distance.
18:30
Speaker 2: And usually there are people in my lab that want
18:33
Speaker 2: to be involved in it and that we're So those
18:37
Speaker 2: are the kinds of things that inform my thinking about
18:42
Speaker 2: about it.
18:43
Speaker 1: So what is something right now on the basic research
18:49
Speaker 1: side that you're excited about. What is a big idea
18:51
Speaker 1: that is early that you think holds a lot of promise.
18:54
Speaker 2: Well, I think the tissue engineering work we're doing holds
18:57
Speaker 2: a lot of promise. I mean an example that we're
18:59
Speaker 2: doing is we're working with the Leeway Si who's head
19:03
Speaker 2: of MIT's pick Hour Institute, and I have a wonderful
19:06
Speaker 2: post doc Alice Stanton. You know, we're actually creating a
19:10
Speaker 2: brain on a chip. It's not been published yet, but
19:13
Speaker 2: she's been able to convert you know, like say we
19:18
Speaker 2: could take your cells and convert it first ips cells
19:21
Speaker 2: and then convert each of those, depending on what we do,
19:24
Speaker 2: to a different brain cell type, six different cell types.
19:27
Speaker 2: She's found a matrix that she can put them on
19:30
Speaker 2: and that really makes them grow and function. And you know,
19:35
Speaker 2: so that's that's something I'm excited about.
19:38
Speaker 1: And what when you say put it on a chip,
19:41
Speaker 1: what does that mean? And then what do you do
19:43
Speaker 1: with my brain on a chip?
19:44
Speaker 2: Yeah? Well, what I mean by in a chip, it's
19:47
Speaker 2: in vitro. It's not in an animal, it's not in
19:49
Speaker 2: a person. What it means is that you could rather
19:53
Speaker 2: like you could think about if you were going to
19:55
Speaker 2: experiment on a person. I mean, of course there's a
19:57
Speaker 2: lot you wouldn't be able to find out anyhow because
20:00
Speaker 2: we'd have to take you apart, and we're obviously not
20:02
Speaker 2: going to do that.
20:03
Speaker 1: I appreciate that.
20:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, And with animals, you know, it's a little bit
20:07
Speaker 2: similar here. So what you do with it is you
20:11
Speaker 2: could literally test thousands and thousands of two thousands and
20:16
Speaker 2: thousands of experiments and get readouts on them. So it
20:20
Speaker 2: might someday reduce animal testing, hopefully also reduce human testing,
20:25
Speaker 2: and may greatly speed up drug discovery. I mean there's
20:28
Speaker 2: so many drugs that you'd like to be able to
20:31
Speaker 2: have for brain disease, right, like for Alzheimer's, for Luke
20:34
Speaker 2: Grigg's disease, als for Parkinson's. So I hope.
20:37
Speaker 1: So brain disease has been famously difficult to treat with drugs, right.
20:41
Speaker 1: It's a very very hard set of diseases, right because.
20:45
Speaker 2: We don't understand it well enough and the tests are
20:48
Speaker 2: very very hard to do. So something like this, if
20:51
Speaker 2: it truly ends up working well, you know, could change
20:55
Speaker 2: that someday. But that's an example of something I'm excited
20:58
Speaker 2: about as you.
20:59
Speaker 1: As you said, it's like it's a platform, right, Presumably
21:02
Speaker 1: if you could do brain cells, you could do different
21:04
Speaker 1: kinds of cells. It could be a way to do
21:06
Speaker 1: lots of testing.
21:07
Speaker 2: Well, we've done, yeah, we've put in this case we
21:10
Speaker 2: have six different brain cell types in vitro. We have
21:14
Speaker 2: our working on other cell types too. We have a
21:17
Speaker 2: guest or intestinal track on a chip. We've had a
21:19
Speaker 2: heart on a chip. And of course it's not just
21:22
Speaker 2: putting them on chip. Someday you could use it for
21:25
Speaker 2: repairing tissues, you know, you could maybe, I mean, in fact,
21:28
Speaker 2: Laura Nicholson, one of my former postdocs. She runs a
21:31
Speaker 2: company that's making new blood vessels that's been used on
21:35
Speaker 2: patients in the Ukraine. Others have used made artificial skin
21:39
Speaker 2: for burn victims or patients with diabetic skin ulcers, and
21:43
Speaker 2: people are trying to make new cartilage, all kinds of tissues.
21:46
Speaker 2: So yeah, so that is a big you know, that's
21:50
Speaker 2: an exciting area.
21:51
Speaker 1: And that tissue engineering side. I mean, does that go
21:54
Speaker 1: back to a kind of similar origin story, right, I
21:57
Speaker 1: know there was sort of early tissue engineering work that
22:00
Speaker 1: you did as well. What was that work?
22:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, well they are. One of the people I got
22:04
Speaker 2: to meet at Children's Hospital is Jay Vacanti. He was
22:07
Speaker 2: a pediatric surgeon is and he was treating patients with
22:11
Speaker 2: liver failure and one day he came to see me said, Bob,
22:15
Speaker 2: you know I do all these transplants, would it ever
22:18
Speaker 2: be possible to make a liver from scratch? And he
22:21
Speaker 2: and I brainstorm and came up with a way that
22:24
Speaker 2: we hope might do that with polymer scaffolds and cells.
22:31
Speaker 2: And so we've continued on working together and separately in
22:34
Speaker 2: different ways to make this happen. But that started probably
22:40
Speaker 2: over forty years ago, and that certainly was the basis
22:44
Speaker 2: for a lot of these things.
22:45
Speaker 1: So we can't synthesize livers yet. But what are some
22:48
Speaker 1: of the clinical applications that have been found to some
22:51
Speaker 1: of the research you did there?
22:53
Speaker 2: Well, you can make artificial skin for burn victims. You
22:57
Speaker 2: looks like we'll be able to make blood vessels. I
22:59
Speaker 2: mean there have been clinical trials on a variety of things,
23:02
Speaker 2: ranging from new spinal cord, repaired hearing loss, you know,
23:08
Speaker 2: a lot of different things. But I think ultimately it's unlimited.
23:12
Speaker 2: You know, you could theoretically use approaches like this if
23:15
Speaker 2: you understand the right cells, the right signals, the right biology,
23:19
Speaker 2: and the right engineering. I don't see that there's necessarily
23:22
Speaker 2: any limit to what you could use it for, but people,
23:25
Speaker 2: we need to understand it more.
23:30
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a minute with the Lightning Round.
23:34
Speaker 1: M M. I want to finish. We're almost done. I
23:45
Speaker 1: appreciate your time. I want to finish with the Lightning Round,
23:48
Speaker 1: which is just some quicker, kind of more random show,
23:51
Speaker 1: maybe occasionally silly questions. Who is one engineer from history
23:57
Speaker 1: who you wish more people knew about?
24:01
Speaker 2: Boy? Well, I suppose a lot of people don't realize
24:04
Speaker 2: maybe that Leonardo da Vinci was a very good engineer.
24:09
Speaker 1: Good What are some of your favorite engineering work of Leonardo's?
24:13
Speaker 2: Well, I mean he did all kinds of things. He
24:16
Speaker 2: looked at at hearts, he looked at at you know,
24:20
Speaker 2: you know, waterflow. I mean he did he did a lot,
24:23
Speaker 2: not just art.
24:25
Speaker 1: Who is the best teacher you ever had?
24:31
Speaker 2: Maybe George Sieli at Cornell?
24:34
Speaker 1: What about him made him such a good teacher?
24:36
Speaker 2: Well, first, he cared a lot and he explained things. Well,
24:40
Speaker 2: but I think caring a lot that that means a lot.
24:44
Speaker 1: But you're also a magician, and I'm curious if there
24:47
Speaker 1: are any skills from close up magic that have been
24:49
Speaker 1: helpful to you in your day job.
24:52
Speaker 2: You know, the one thing that does make a difference
24:55
Speaker 2: with magic is presentation. So you know, if you give
25:01
Speaker 2: if so what I learned in magic. If I make
25:03
Speaker 2: a mistake, sometimes of course you make it deliberately. But
25:08
Speaker 2: if I made an mistake, you know, it's part of
25:13
Speaker 2: the show. You don't get upset, You just you know,
25:16
Speaker 2: you just you just go with the flow. And what
25:19
Speaker 2: I'd say is if I made a mistake from the talk,
25:22
Speaker 2: same thing. You know, it's like you don't get flustered.
25:25
Speaker 2: You just say you just keep going, and that does
25:28
Speaker 2: make a difference.
25:30
Speaker 1: So your research also helped to create, as I understand it,
25:34
Speaker 1: a line of hair care products called living Proof. Jennifer Aniston,
25:39
Speaker 1: who I will say had great hair before the company started,
25:42
Speaker 1: is involved in that company, And so I'm curious, what's
25:46
Speaker 1: your favorite living Proof product? And are you using it
25:49
Speaker 1: right now?
25:51
Speaker 2: Well, so I would say, you know, one of the
25:54
Speaker 2: living Proof products is called PhD and stands for Perfect
25:57
Speaker 2: hair Day.
25:58
Speaker 1: Oh, Perfect hair Day? Okay, are you using it right now? So?
26:02
Speaker 2: I use a shampoos okay, but gee, my wife and
26:06
Speaker 2: my daughter and lots of people use lots of the products.
26:11
Speaker 2: But I basically use it in the shampoo every so
26:14
Speaker 2: often when my hair gets longer, I have, you know,
26:17
Speaker 2: just a spray that I put on that doesn't make
26:19
Speaker 2: it frize up so much.
26:22
Speaker 1: Great. Is there anything else you think we should talk about?
26:27
Speaker 2: Well, the only other thing I'd say that we've done
26:29
Speaker 2: that we really didn't touch on is you know, we're
26:34
Speaker 2: doing a lot of work with the Gates Foundation to
26:36
Speaker 2: help the developing world, you know, and I'm excited about
26:39
Speaker 2: that as well. I mean, they've been a big supporter
26:42
Speaker 2: of our lab and he's done a terrific job in
26:46
Speaker 2: terms of helping and it's I think the work is
26:49
Speaker 2: leading to new kinds of nutrition, new kinds of oral
26:53
Speaker 2: delivery that could last much longer than just a day
26:57
Speaker 2: can lead. It's also leading to what we call self
27:00
Speaker 2: boosting injections, so you wouldn't have to come back for
27:02
Speaker 2: a second shot. So I think it's leading to a
27:04
Speaker 2: lot of things that I hope will someday help a
27:06
Speaker 2: lot of people, whether you not only in the developing world,
27:10
Speaker 2: but everyone in the world period.
27:14
Speaker 1: Of those technologies that you just listed, is any one
27:17
Speaker 1: of them, particularly you know, farther along in development.
27:21
Speaker 2: Well, several of them are already. I mean the pills
27:25
Speaker 2: that you can swallow orally are in that lasts for
27:28
Speaker 2: a week or a month. They're in phase three clinical trials.
27:32
Speaker 2: There's a company Lindra that Geotraverso and I have start
27:36
Speaker 2: that's probably the most advanced.
27:38
Speaker 1: Is that for anti malarials or what is the first
27:41
Speaker 1: application there?
27:42
Speaker 2: The most advanced application of schizophrenias and phase three trial
27:46
Speaker 2: It is in clinical trials from malaria too. Okay, but
27:49
Speaker 2: that's like at phase one.
27:50
Speaker 1: So Presumably that would be a big deal because drug
27:54
Speaker 1: adherence is always a problem. People very often don't take
27:56
Speaker 1: their drugs. Presumably people who are mentally ill might have
27:59
Speaker 1: more trouble with adherents. So if you could have a
28:01
Speaker 1: pill once a week instead of every day, that would
28:03
Speaker 1: be a very large.
28:04
Speaker 2: Impress Yeah, and also once a month. You know, we've
28:07
Speaker 2: been working onto you know, like a once a mo
28:09
Speaker 2: on birth control pill and yeah, so all those things,
28:12
Speaker 2: do you know, things moving forward.
28:17
Speaker 1: Robert Langer is an institute professor at MIT. Today's show
28:23
Speaker 1: was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang. It was edited by
28:26
Speaker 1: Lyddy Jean Kott and engineered by Sarah Bruguer. You can
28:30
Speaker 1: email us at problem at Pushkin dot fm. I'm Jacob
28:33
Speaker 1: Goldstein and we'll be back next week with another episode
28:36
Speaker 1: of What's Your Problem.