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Queen Elizabeth prizewinner: Put pharmacies on chips12:03 03 February 2015 byChris BaraniukFor similar stories, visit theInterviewsTopic GuideChemical engineer Robert Langer has won the ?1 million 2015 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. The prize celebrates the engineers behind "ground-breaking innovation that has been of global benefit to humanity". The announcement was made today at Prince Philip House in London by Lord Browne, chair of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation, in the presence of The Duke of York. The queen will present Langer with the prize at Buckingham Palace later this year. Langer's work, particularly on controlled drug delivery, has provided the foundation for treatments for various cancers, diabetes, and many other conditions. He is now developing microchip implants for long-term controlled drug release, an innovation which promises to benefit millions of people. New Scientist spoke to him today. Congratulations on winning this award.Thank you very much. Really I'm honoured, somewhat shocked and humbled by getting it. I think it's a terrific prize, first of all – it's wonderful to see the UK and the queen wanting to do something for engineering. You have made a string of groundbreaking discoveries at the interface between engineering and medicine. How did it all begin?
When I graduated in 1974 there was an oil crisis and I got 20 job offers from oil companies. One of the companies said if you can just increase the yield of this one chemical by 0.1 per cent that would be wonderful – it would be worth billions. I remember thinking that I didn't want to do that. I started looking up other things like education and medicine. I wrote to Judah Folkman, a surgeon in Boston, and he was kind enough to offer me a job. I was the only engineer in the surgery lab; indeed I think I was the only engineer in the whole hospital, and I just saw so many medical problems there that I thought using my engineering background I could solve these problems in different and, I thought, better ways. It was almost like being a kid in an intellectual candy shop. What did your work with Folkman involve?
He had a theory that if you could stop the growth of blood vessels, that might be a way of stopping cancer. I didn't realise, but it was a very controversial theory at the time, and what he wanted me to do was isolate the first substance that could stop blood vessels growing. We had an idea of what such a substance might be but it was a fairly large molecule. Why was the size of this molecule a problem?
Large molecules often have short half-lives when injected into the body, because enzymes degrade them. That was true for this particular molecule too – it was quickly destroyed. I had the idea of developing polymers that could protect the molecule from being destroyed and then release them over whatever period of time you wanted. Now such an approach is used for many therapeutic molecules, for treating cancer, endometriosis, schizophrenia, type 2 diabetes, alcoholism and many other conditions. How did you come up with microchip implants that give people doses of drugs, and what does this approach offer that others don't?
I had the idea while watching a TV show in the 90s about how computer chips were made. I thought you could actually make a chip with little wells with different doses of the same drug or different drugs – you could literally have a pharmacy on a chip. You could release the drugs using a computer program or even manually, by remote control. The clinical trial that we did was for women with osteoporosis. They are supposed to take parathyroid hormone treatment via injections once a day, but the compliance rate is very low. With our technology, there's a little program and it's set so that every night the cover comes off one of the tiny wells containing the drug. You could also use this technology for birth control. No contraceptive implant today lasts for more than five years and no implant can currently be turned on or off whenever the woman wants. We're designing a 17-year implant which the woman may turn off whenever she wants to conceive. Your engineer's perspective has given you a unique view on medicine. Is the field still reluctant to embrace biotechnology?
I think there are always battles to be fought; the natural tendency of many scientists and companies is to be conservative. I also think that's true of grant reviewers. By and large, medicine is embracing new ideas but it's going to be the entrepreneurs, the new professors, the young people who are willing to think outside the box and not necessarily go down a conventional path – I think it's they who will change the future. People have to take bold steps, sometimes, in the beginning. Profile
Robert Langer is a chemical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A renowned inventor, he is the engineer with the most cited research papers ever and a pioneer in bioengineering, drug-delivery technology, tissue engineering and nanotechnology.
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