Biomedical Engineer Robert Langer Drive And Optimism Keep Him Striving.(LEADERS & SUCCESS)

Byline: Michael Mink

Robert Langer had a vision. But he didn't seem able to convince anyone else to share it.

In 1978 Langer was a young college professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Educated as a chemical engineer, he'd invented a new drug delivery system a few years earlier. Made out of dissolvable plastic polymers, the small devices were implanted into a patient to directly target a disease.

Langer's breakthrough was that his delivery system was able to release large-molecule drugs, such as cancer chemotherapies. This hadn't been possible with previous systems. As the polymer dissolved, the drug was slowly released over the course of days or months, depending on a patient's needs.

Langer was seeking grants to expand his preliminary work. "A lot of our ideas were sort of futuristic and we had trouble getting funding for them," Langer, 53, recalled in a recent interview.

After he was turned down for two grants in one day, disappointment set in. One rejection, Langer said, "was really disappointing to me because I thought it was more on the engineering side. The other (rejection) was almost insulting. They said, "How can a chemical engineer do anything in (cancer treatment) with no background in biology and even less in oncology?'

"I was sort of depressed for three months about it, but I guess it's just my nature to say, "OK, I'm going to try again. And if it doesn't work, try again.' Because I believed they were good ideas."