Bob Langer, MIT professor and co-founder of Moderna, discusses the shift in the pharmaceutical market from small molecules to protein therapeutics.
Opinion
Langer: Withdrawing Vioxx from the market in 2005 was wrong
“The second one that I think had a negative effect was the Vioxx situation in 2005, and, you know, there was just a small increase in deaths with this drug, but there were so many lawsuits over it, That people at the FDA would get called on the carpet for appro…”
Assertion Supported
Langer: Artificial hearts still use ladies' girdle material after 50 years
“If you wanted to make an artificial heart, what the clinicians did in 1967 is they said, well, what object in your house has a good flex life like a heart? And they came up with the idea of a lady's girdle. So they looked at what that was made out of, and It's…”
Assertion Partly supported
Langer: Breast implants rely on mattress stuffing and silicone lubricant
“That's still one of the two main breast implant materials. One is a mattress stuffing, and the other is actually a lubricant, which is silicone.”
Insight
Langer: Nucleic acid therapeutics will fail without targeted delivery
“And these, I think delivery ends up being so critical because if you can't deliver them, you know, probably those drugs will not work.”
Assertion Supported
Langer: High-throughput screening solved Abbott's Norvir crystal crisis in two weeks
“Now, seven years later, what we did is, just in two weeks, using this high-throughput approach, not only created crystal form two, which is where they were when they stopped, but we also created crystal form one and discovered three new crystal forms that had …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Langer: Academic involvement in startups was frowned upon in the 1980s
“If I go back to when I started, you know, doing this in the, you know, early eighties, that I think in academia, it was somewhat frowned upon. Of getting involved with very translational work and applied work in companies. And I don't think that that's, and I …”