Medicine Needs More Innovation

Boston, 1974: Unlike his MIT classmates, chemical engineer Robert Langer had no interest in working for the oil giants. He turned down more than 20 job offers because he wanted to make a difference in people’s lives. He was fascinated by biology and medicine. At the time, Judah Folkman, a surgeon at Harvard and Boston Children’s Hospital, was thinking about treating cancer in unconventional ways. Folkman sometimes hired unusual people, a colleague had advised him. So, Langer ended up working as a dark horse in the lab of another dark horse.

Fifty years later, we know what a stroke of luck that was. Together, they achieved what their peers considered impossible. Folkman, a surgeon, wanted to cut off the supply of nutrients to tumors. It was a radically new approach to cancer treatment and one that few believed would work. To do this, he not only wanted to develop a drug to prevent blood vessels from growing toward the tumor. He also needed a way to package it so that the drug would be released gradually at a suitable site in the body.

Langer, who has been experimenting with polymers, was tasked with devising the material in which to package the drug. After hundreds of failures, he succeeded. Today, the approach seems obvious. But at the time, Langer was somewhat of a pariah: Chemical engineers did not work on medical projects nor were they thought of as entrepreneurs – and he was the only chemical engineer at the hospital.

Until biomedical engineering became an established field in the U.S., individual researchers faced pushback from all sides. Today, few universities can afford to ignore the field. They are surrounded by start-ups that turn ideas and prototypes into marketable products. The list of patents and biotechs initiated by Bob Langer alone is too long to mention. Moderna, a producer of mRNA vaccines against COVID, is the most recent success.

Germany can point to world-class research in both biomedicine and engineering. But so far these fields are hardly linked here. Given our aging population, we cannot afford to continue in this way! To stay healthy as long as possible and keep our healthcare system affordable, we need a culture that fosters innovation, problem-solving, and entrepreneurship. Ultimately, it is not just about tailoring treatments more effectively to individual patients and making them scalable; we also need to detect diseases earlier or if possible, prevent them from developing in the first place. Achieving this requires new diagnostics, predictive models, implants, and drugs.

The innovations of the past decade, from artificial intelligence and single-cell analysis to CRISPR and imaging, have laid the foundation. But that is not enough. For example, for gene therapy to help patients, CRISPR must be delivered to the right place in the body. You can’t do that without biomedical engineering! The same is true if we want to create cells, tissues and organs for transplantation.

In the Helmholtz Association, we have all the prerequisites to leverage the potential of bioengineering and expedite the transformation of biology-inspired technologies into marketable products: The multidisciplinary expertise and technological infrastructure across six research fields create an environment that is unique in the world. We simply need to assemble the puzzle pieces thoughtfully and unite people who have never collaborated before.

At the Max Delbrück Center, we are currently hosting Milica Radisic from the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto for a three-year collaborative project. She is working on supplying blood vessels to organs-on-a-chip. She completed her Ph.D. under the mentorship of Bob Langer. Her mentor's advice was: “Work on important problems, surround yourself with the best people – and think BIG!”

Picture: Peter Himsel/Max Delbrück Center

Discover more about Biomedical Enigneering at Helmholtz:

Briefing: Helmholtz Biomedical Engineering (PDF)

Website: www.helmholtz-bioengineering.de

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