Bob Langer, MIT professor and co-founder of numerous biotech companies, reflects on how academic attitudes toward commercial spinouts have evolved since the 1980s.
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 Partly supported
Langer: Seven of Top 10 Best-Selling Drugs Are Protein Biologics
“If you look at the top 10 selling best drugs in, you know, this past year, seven of them were protein, are protein drugs. If you looked at it even 15 years ago, at best it would have been one, but now that's really the majority. And the sales are over two hund…”
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 …”