Professor Robert Langer is a household name today, but early in his career, when he presented his idea of directly implanting an angiogenesis inhibitor in a tumour, he was told by an older scientist to seek another job. “I had a very inauspicious beginning, but I believed in what I was doing so I kept at it,” he said during his plenary lecture. The success of his idea laid the groundwork for nanoparticle-based drug delivery, a growing technology area in modern medicine.
As he detailed his research journey and how he persevered despite the naysayers, Prof Langer also shared the promising results of his current research, which includes personalising cancer vaccines and delivering vaccines with microneedle patches. “I don’t think anything is impossible. You just don’t know how long it may take,” he expressed, describing how his worldview is shaped by the criticism and rejections he had faced.
