Pitt’s Senior Vice Chancellor for Research, Dr. Rob Rutenbar introduced MIT professor Robert Langer to a packed room of Pitt faculty as the nation’s preeminent “rock star” of academic innovation while Senior Vice Chancellor of Health Sciences and John and Gertrude Petersen Dean of the School of Medicine, Dr. Anantha Shekar hosted the fire-side chat for nearly an hour.
The numbers tell the story of Langer’s chart-topping career:
- Approximately 1,000 issued patents and hundreds more pending
- Technologies licensed to 400 companies
- More than 40 biotechnology startups launched, including Moderna, developer of one of the approved Covid vaccines
- 19 products approved by the FDA in the past two years alone based on IP from his lab
And now he is executive chairman of T.Rx Capital, a venture capital firm he formed with his son Michael to fund promising new biomedical innovations, specially focused on those originating from university labs.
Langer brought his innovation tour to Pitt, to learn more about the exciting innovations happening here, while sharing his own story and offering inspirational advice to prospective academic innovators and entrepreneurs.
An Uncertain Start
Langer said he started his career more like a subway busker than a rock star. After earning his PhD in chemical engineering from MIT, he received several offers from oil companies. But he said the idea of spending his life eking out incremental gains in petrochemical yields depressed him.
He wanted to make a real societal impact somehow, but he stumbled out of the gate as his research proposals were rejected one after another.
“Nobody would hire me,” he said of his early career interest in applying chemical engineering concepts to medicine. He eventually began obtaining grants and publishing papers after he found a mentor who encouraged his unconventional approach and challenged him to think big.
Judah Folkman, a pediatric surgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital, hired him as the only engineering postdoc in a Harvard Medical School surgery laboratory. Folkman was doing novel work in angiogenesis on the unpopular-at-the-time theory that blocking blood vessel growth could starve cancer tumors.
Langer’s complementary work in the lab would help develop new methods for delivering large molecule drugs at a controlled rate using biocompatible polymers.
Langer said it is important for researchers to take risks pursuing breakthrough basic research that can potentially lead to paradigm shifts in their fields.
“You may fail at times, but you have to try,” he said.
Equally important, he said, is to maintain a focus on making an impact for discovery through commercialization.
He said after 10 years in the lab he obtained a broad patent on his discoveries and was approached by two large companies who began supporting his work with large grants, with promises they would commercialize his work. After a year or two, he said they gave up. But the idea of commercialization had taken root, so he co-founded his own company and has never looked back.
His advice to faculty and students interested in achieving impact through commercialization is to make sure they submit their innovations to their technology commercialization offices before disclosing them publicly through papers or presentations so that the intellectual property can be protected. Langer stated, “I wanted to change people’s lives and papers didn’t do that,” suggesting that other impacts may be greater.
Second, he said it is important to do as much de-risking work as possible while still in the university.
“Don’t start a company too early,” he warned. “If you don’t have sufficient papers, patents, animal data, it will be hard to get funding (for a startup).”
Finally, he said to build a strong team.
“I’m a decent scientist, but I’m not a businessman” he said. “The companies that I have done are not successful primarily because of me. Any time we have succeeded, it’s because we have a great team.”
Moderna’s Bursts onto the Big Stage
One of Langer’s biggest successes has been Moderna, which he co-founded in 2010, again marrying his drug delivery innovation to a promising new biotechnology, in this case “modified” messenger RNA (mRNA), which can be introduced into human cells to produce specific proteins associated with a specific disease.
The company went public in 2018 in the largest biotech initial public offering to date at the time, raising over $600 million and valuing the company at more than $7.5 billion, despite having no products on the market or clinical trials in progress.
It had been exploring therapies in cardiovascular disease, oncology, and rare diseases when the COVID pandemic caused the company to put everything else on hold as it raced to develop an mRNA vaccine targeting the SARS-CoV-2 virus spike protein. The company received nearly $1 billion in federal funding to develop its vaccine simultaneously with a slightly different mRNA vaccine from Pfizer and its partner BioNTech. In a miracle of modern medicine, the vaccines went from the bench to the market in mere months.
As the pandemic has receded, the company continued its previous work. In August, the initial results from a joint clinical trial of the Moderna platform combined with Merck’s immunotherapy blockbuster drug, Keytruda, showed the first-ever positive Phase 3 result for a personalized cancer vaccine in patients with melanoma. This resulted in the company’s stock doubling in a single day on the promise of potential FDA approval for the therapy.
Langer’s Encore Advice
Rob Rutenbar, Pitt’s Senior Vice Chancellor for Research, shared with Langer some of Pitt’s innovation bona fides over the past five years to demonstrate the growing culture of innovation and entrepreneurship at the university.
- 1,900 invention disclosures submitted
- 560 patents issued
- 765 options or licenses executed
- 65 companies launched
The most impressive number to him, however, is the 50 percent growth in the number of faculty and student innovators involved in new invention submissions over those five years.
“I love Pitt,” Langer responded. “I have several of my former students at Pitt,” he said, name-checking Steven Little, Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering with several other appointments.
Shekhar asked Langer for his thoughts on further strengthening innovation and entrepreneurship at a large academic medical center like Pitt.
“What do you advise other universities and tech transfer offices to do to become more risk-taking?” he said.
Langer replied that universities should not focus on the financial end-result of technology commercialization.
“Money shouldn’t be the primary goal. The goal should be impact,” he said. “If you look at MIT when I was a graduate student, the area around campus was a slum. There were no startup companies, no restaurants, no hotels. Today, because MIT focused on impact, you have companies like Moderna, Biogen, and every major pharmaceutical company with a major presence.”
He also said universities should celebrate innovation and entrepreneurship.
“Don’t apologize for (commercialization),” he said. “Celebrate it. If these things don’t happen, lives don’t get saved.”
Pitt will be spotlighting its innovators at the annual Celebration of Innovation and Entrepreneurship on November 19. Learn more and register.
Evan Facher, Pitt’s vice chancellor for innovation and entrepreneurship and associate dean for commercial translation at the School of Medicine, presented Langer with a custom Pitt lab coat.
“Every day, Pitt innovators are proving possible,” Facher said. “Dr. Langer’s career reflects the culture we have been building that encourages curiosity, collaboration, and commitment to rigorous science paired with the courage to commercialize it, resulting in positive impact on society.”
