Robert Langer

He has written that he was born at Albany Medical Center and grew up in Albany, New York; his father, Robert, ran a small liquor store and played math games with him, his mother, Mary, was a homemaker, and he has a sister, Kathy.⁠[1]

At age 11 he was given a Gilbert chemistry set and was soon making rubber and simple plastics; at the Milne School in Albany he excelled in math and science.⁠[2]

In 1970 he received a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Cornell UniversityCornell UniversityCornell University is a private research university in Ithaca, New York, and a member of the Ivy League. It is New York State's federal land-grant university, a distinction unique within the Ivy League. Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White founded the university in 1865, and it opened in 1868. In addition to its Ithaca campus, Cornell operates Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell Tech in New York City and a medical college in Qatar. It enrolled 26,793 students in fall 2024. Its president is Michael I. Kotlikoff.Open the full entry.⁠[3]

He then studied chemical engineering at MIT, earning his doctorate in 1974; during that time he helped start a school founded to prevent teenage drug abuse, creating and chairing its math and science departments.⁠[4]

On finishing his doctorate in 1974 he turned down lucrative industrial job offers and joined the laboratory of cancer researcher Judah Folkman; he said the job had a profound impact on what he ended up doing with his life.⁠[5]

He recalls that it was then widely believed that large molecules such as proteins could not be slowly released from biocompatible polymers, and that after some 200 failed attempts he found a way.⁠[6]

In 1976 he and Folkman published a Nature paper on polymers for the sustained release of proteins and other macromolecules, and that year he also co-authored a Science paper on isolating a cartilage factor that inhibits tumor neovascularization.⁠[7]

After his postdoc, his applications to chemical engineering departments all failed, and MIT food scientist Nevin Scrimshaw hired him into the nutrition department; when the Department of Applied Biological Sciences was disbanded in 1998, he moved to chemical engineering.⁠[8]

He became a visiting assistant professor in 1977, assistant professor in 1978, associate professor in 1981 and professor in 1985, and from 1988 was Kenneth J. Germeshausen Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering.⁠[9]

From 1980 his group designed and synthesized new polymers for medicine, creating polyanhydrides that erode from the surface like a bar of soap and allow drug release lasting from one day to six years.⁠[10]

He recalls that the examiner rejected the patent application five years in a row; after a 1982 citation search turned up a 1979 paper by five polymer scientists calling the results “surprising,” and he obtained affidavits from all five, U.S. Patent 4,391,797 was allowed.⁠[6]

In 1985 he began working with Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon Henry Brem on a small wafer placed in the skull after tumor removal that releases a chemotherapy drug as it dissolves.⁠[10]

In 1987 he and MIT professor Alexander Klibanov founded Enzytech to make a microparticle drug-delivery system; Alkermes acquired it a few years later and used the technology in treatments for schizophrenia, opioid addiction and other conditions.⁠[8]

His wife, Laura Langer, earned a PhD in neuroscience at MIT; they married in 1988 and have three children.⁠[2]

He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine (then the Institute of Medicine) in 1989, to both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences in 1992, and to the National Academy of Inventors in 2012.⁠[11]

He served on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Science Board from 1995 to 2002, chairing it from 1999 to 2002.⁠[12]

He received a 1996 Gairdner Foundation International Award, the first time in almost 40 years that the foundation honored biomedical engineering; he recalled that when he began drug-delivery work in the 1970s, colleagues thought it was “on the fringe, at best.”⁠[13]

The biodegradable-polymer brain cancer system he developed with Brem was approved by the FDA in 1996, the first approved brain cancer treatment in 20 years and the first polymer-based treatment to deliver chemotherapy directly to the tumor site.⁠[14]

In 1998 he received the Lemelson-MIT Prize, being cited as one of history’s most prolific inventors in medicine.⁠[15]

On February 19, 2002, he received the $500,000 Charles Stark Draper Prize from the National Academy of Engineering; by then he had written about 700 papers and held about 400 patents licensed to more than 80 companies.⁠[5]

In March 2005 he was named Institute Professor, the highest honor awarded by the MIT faculty and administration, bringing the number of Institute Professors to 15; he described his reaction as “a combination of shock on the one hand and joy on the other.”⁠[16]

He was selected for the National Inventors Hall of Fame for developing sustained-release drug delivery systems and inducted on May 6, 2006; he then held more than 500 patents, and his research had spawned more than a dozen biotech firms and more than 35 products on the market or in human testing.⁠[17]

On July 27, 2007, President George W. Bush presented him with the 2006 National Medal of Science (engineering) at the White House, for his discoveries in polymeric controlled-release systems, tissue engineering and the synthesis of new materials.⁠[18]

In June 2008 he and four other scientists shared the Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research; he was cited for biomimetic materials in the form of polymers, nanoparticles or chips that allow controlled drug delivery throughout the body.⁠[19]

On June 11, 2008, Finnish President Tarja Halonen presented him in Helsinki with the Millennium Technology Prize, worth 800,000 euros, for his inventions and development of biomaterials for controlled drug release and tissue regeneration.⁠[20]

Since 2009 he has been the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT; since 1999 he has also been Senior Lecturer on Surgery at Harvard Medical School.⁠[7]

He has written that the best-known company he helped start is Moderna, in 2010.⁠[1]

In June 2011 the American Chemical Society selected him for its 2012 Priestley Medal, the society’s most prestigious prize and the first won by a chemical engineer in 65 years.⁠[21]

In December 2012 he was named one of eleven recipients of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, one of only a handful of Americans to have won both it and the National Medal of Science.⁠[22]

In January 2013 Israel’s Wolf Foundation named him a recipient of the 2013 Wolf Prize in Chemistry, worth $100,000, to be presented by President Shimon Peres at the Knesset that May.⁠[23]

He was one of six scientists to receive the 2014 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, each worth $3 million, for discoveries leading to controlled drug-release systems and new biomaterials.⁠[24]

On June 20, 2014, Japan’s Inamori Foundation announced that he had won the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology (Biotechnology and Medical Technology); later that month he also received the 2014 Biotechnology Heritage Award.⁠[25]

The Kyoto Prize citation credits him with first proposing cell “scaffolding” made of biodegradable materials, creating the field of tissue engineering.⁠[9]

He received the 2015 Hoover Medal; the citation biography says his laboratory had trained more than 900 students and researchers and helped launch more than 30 companies.⁠[4]

On February 3, 2015, he was named winner of the 2015 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, in particular for being the first to engineer polymers enabling the controlled release of large-molecular-weight drugs to treat cancer and other diseases.⁠[26]

The prize is worth £1 million; the award press release said his work helped lay the foundation for treatments including Lupron Depot, Zoladex, Risperdal Consta and Bydureon, as well as drug-coated cardiovascular stents.⁠[27]

His other honors include the 2016 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science, the 2003 Harvey Prize and the 2005 Dan David Prize.⁠[11]

He appeared on episode 105 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, “Edison of Medicine,” whose description calls him one of the most cited researchers in history; topics included big ideas in science, making new drugs, drug delivery, tissue engineering, patenting, startups and mentoring students.⁠[28]

He has co-founded more than 35 companies, the best known being Moderna, which produced a U.S.-approved COVID-19 vaccine in December 2020.⁠[14]

On November 25, 2022, at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome, he received the 2022 Balzan Prize for Biomaterials for Nanomedicine and Tissue Engineering, worth 750,000 Swiss francs, half of which must fund research projects by young scholars.⁠[29]

On June 12, 2024, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters announced that he, Paul Alivisatos and Chad Mirkin had won the 2024 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience; his award centered on his work to improve drug delivery.⁠[30]

On July 23, 2024, Moderna announced that he was stepping down from its board after 14 years and would remain an adviser to the company; he said “now is the right time for me to step down.”⁠[31]

As of October 2026 the Koch Institute describes him as one of nine Institute Professors at MIT, with more than 1,500 articles cited over 396,000 times and patents licensed or sublicensed to more than 400 companies; his laboratory works on polymers and lipids to deliver proteins, DNA and RNA, on tissue engineering and other areas.⁠[32]

Personal website: Public link: https://langerlab.mit.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[32]

Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Official website: https://www.mit.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[32]

Moderna: Official website: https://www.modernatx.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[31]