Dr Robert Langer on Novel Delivery Systems for Drugs and Vaccines

Robert Langer is an Institute Professor at MIT (there are 13 Institute Professors at MIT; being an Institute Professor is the highest honor that can be awarded to a faculty member). Over 300 of his trainees are now professors, 17 have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, 12 have been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, 21 to the National Academy of Inventors and 35 to the Technology Review 35. His h-index of 251 is the highest of any engineer in history and he has over 1,300 issued and pending patents worldwide. His patents have licensed or sublicensed to over 350 companies. He served as Chairman of the FDA’s SCIENCE BOARD (it’s highest advisory board) from 1999-2002. Dr Langer is also one of very few individuals ever elected to the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Inventors. He is one of four living individuals to have received both the United States National Medal of Science and the United States National Medal of Technology and Innovation. In 2015, Dr Langer received the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, the world’s largest engineering prize. He has also received the Charles Stark Draper Prize (sometimes referred to as the engineering Nobel Prize), the Albany Medical Center Prize, the Wolf Prize for Chemistry, the Millennium Technology Prize, the Priestley Medal (highest award of the American Chemical Society), the Gairdner Prize, the Kyoto Prize, the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and the Lemelson-MIT Prize, for being “one of history’s most prolific inventors in medicine.” Dr Langer holds 33 honorary doctorates including honorary degrees from Harvard and Yale.

Barbara is the Global Head of Research Technologies Partnering and a member of the Roche Pharma Partnering leadership team since May 2019. In her role she is working closely with the two research and early development organizations at Genentech and Roche (gRED and pRED) to identify transformative science developed by biotechs around the globe and help set up partnerships with such biotechs to enable novel discovery programs with the goal to increase the number of medicines impacting patients’ lives.Before that, Barbara was a Global Business Development Director in the Innovation Partnering group in Roche Partnering, where she was responsible for the evaluation, negotiation and ultimately alliance management of discovery partnerships for pRED covering different therapeutic modalities in various disease areas.Barbara joined Roche in 2007 as a Global Drug Delivery Evaluator in Formulation Research, setting up numerous evaluation agreements with biotechs to apply drug delivery approaches to Roche’s pipeline molecules, before fully transitioning to Roche Partnering in 2012.Prior to Roche, Barbara worked at Novartis for ten years both on formulation development of poorly soluble molecules as well as on evaluations of reformulation opportunities as potential line extensions based on external drug delivery technologies. She is trained as a pharmacist with a PhD from the University of Basel.