Bob Langer: ‘Research becomes business when innovation is systemic and work is carried out as a team’

For years, mRNA was a message without an envelope. In 2005, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman – who were to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2023 – at the University of Pennsylvania had modified its chemical composition, but when injected as it was, the molecule was destroyed by the body before reaching the cells. The limiting factor was no longer the biology of RNA, but its delivery. The answer lay in a laboratory at MIT, where particles capable of carrying large molecules had been designed for almost forty years. This is the Langer Lab, named after Robert Samuel Langer, one of the eleven Institute Professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the most cited engineer in history and the fourth most cited scholar across all fields, having authored over 1,600 scientific articles. But this statistic alone cannot explain Langer’s significance in biotechnology research. To understand it, we must return to the phrase he repeated several times during our conversation: ‘They told us it was impossible.’ And he, who still enjoys performing magic tricks to this day, does not believe in the impossible.

To understand what led to the mRNA vaccine revolution – starting with the Covid vaccines – and to the emergence of Moderna, a publicly listed biotech company with a market capitalisation of over 75 billion, we need to go back half a century. At the time, the scientific community believed it was impossible to transport large molecules through the body without them being destroyed. What then seemed like a niche curiosity, drug delivery, has, thirty-four years later, become the missing link in the mRNA revolution. ‘The Canadian biologist Derrick Rossi, building on the work of Karikó and Weissman, had demonstrated that mRNA could be delivered to cells and alter their characteristics, and he was interested in setting up a company. They had suggested he come to me, probably because I could sort out the other part – the delivery. As early as the early 1970s, our laboratory was the first to demonstrate that it was possible to design tiny particles to carry large molecules, including nucleic acids and RNAs. ‘People told us it was impossible, but in 1976 we managed to publish an article in *Nature* in which we demonstrated precisely that,’ explains Bob Langer, who is in Milan to explore potential biotech projects with Koinos Capital Sgr, a multi-strategy investment firm focused on entrepreneurship and technology. The analogy Langer uses to explain it all is disarmingly simple: ‘If you simply injected mRNA into a person, it wouldn’t work: it would be destroyed. But if you encapsulate it within a delivery system – in this case, a nanoparticle – that protects it. Then the body does the rest.’ Fifty years of work, summed up in three sentences.

The meeting with Rossi not only spurred the Langer Lab to further its research into drug delivery, but also opened up the possibility of bringing the discovery to market. ‘On the very day Rossi came to see me, I told my wife that I thought it would become the most successful biotech company in history. I realised straight away that we could solve that problem and develop mRNA drugs. That was in 2010,’ Langer emphasises. To turn a scientific insight into a giant, a couple of essential conditions were needed, which Langer cites without any rhetoric: an investor who believed in the idea, Noubar Afeyan, and a capable chief executive, Stéphane Bancel. ‘When he became CEO of Moderna, my confidence in just how big the company would become increased enormously.’ In this view, innovation is a team effort, not the product of a lone genius. And when it comes to the importance of the team, Langer – who used to play softball – frequently returns to this theme in his reasoning, always speaking in the plural.

‘The Langer Lab is a laboratory where we carry out basic research. The primary aim of our work is never to turn it into a business; that’s something that might happen if we happen to discover something potentially very important, but what we’re really aiming for is for the work we do to have a tangible impact on the world. ‘We want to genuinely help people, first and foremost,’ emphasises Langer. The primary aim for his research team, therefore, is never commercial. The company comes later, when the discovery changes in nature and becomes what he calls a ‘platform technology’. This is the key to his entire vision because a platform does not produce a single drug; it produces many.

Wearing jeans, a white T-shirt and a blue jacket, Langer – who turned 78 on 29 August – speaks with the precision of someone accustomed to breaking down complex problems into their essential components and gives practical examples: genetic engineering is a ‘platform technology’. ‘One of the first companies I advised was Genentech, back in the 1970s. It’s a platform because it allows for the production of multiple drugs. In their case, human growth hormone, insulin and TPA. Moderna is also a platform, because it can produce mRNA for any vaccine or any disease. So a key criterion for understanding when an idea can become a business is that it is a platform offering many opportunities to make a difference in the world,” explains Langer, who nevertheless points out that several factors are necessary for research to lead to the creation and development of a business: ‘Platform technology is also a very important feature from an economic perspective, for two reasons. The first is that in biotechnology, a great deal of funding needs to be raised, and if it were raised entirely from investors, the risk of dilution for the founders would be very high. With a platform, however, agreements can be made with other companies to raise more capital without diluting shareholdings. The second reason is that in biotech there will be successes and failures, but a platform offers more opportunities. One or two successes can offset dozens of failures. If you manage to find a cure for even just one disease, that makes a huge difference, even if you are unsuccessful with the others. You have more opportunities to succeed.’ In other words, platform technology makes failure sustainable.