Robert Langer, the world’s most cited engineer, has seen ups and downs in the biotech industry over the past 40 years, so he isn’t overly worried about the current slowdown. What concerns him is the spread of scientific misinformation.
Langer has won more than 220 major awards, written more than 1,600 articles, owns 1,500 patents and has been involved in dozens of startups, including co-founding Moderna, maker of a widely distributed Covid vaccine. His h-index of 319 – a measure of both the productivity and influence of scholars’ published work by looking at how often others rely on it – is the highest ever recorded for an engineer and the third highest across all academic disciplines, according to the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering.
His Langer Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology employs around 100 people researching ways to deliver medicine in the body and advance tissue engineering.
The lab remains in full operation on 19 active projects, despite the biotech industry seeing a drop in funding, layoffs in manufacturing, a rise in lab vacancies and just a modest uptick in the overall drug pipeline, according to the MassBio 2025 Industry Snapshot. Langer sat down with Cambridge Day last week to discuss the state of biotech and research in the region.
Langer has seen slowdowns before – in 1992-1994 and 2008-2009 – but this downturn has lasted longer, with biotech companies struggling to raise money amid falling stock prices for “maybe the last three or four years,” he said.
He says a long period of accelerated growth caused unrealistic expectations among investors in multiple sectors of the economy. “When there’s an up, there’s an overexuberance of money pumped into something, and then some things probably shouldn’t have had as much money pumped into them,” he said. “People get too exuberant, and that’s not limited to biotech.”
He noted a hype cycle from 2003, when the Human Genome Project completed its mapping and sequencing work. “The potential of the Human Genome Project is and was enormous,” he said. “But people got the expectation that it was probably going to change the world very quickly in terms of products. And yet everything in medicine takes time.”
Federal budget cut effects
Massachusetts organizations received 9.9 percent of all National Institutes of Health research project grants in 2024, according to the MassBio 2025 Industry Snapshot, but if the pace of funding seen this year continues, Massachusetts organizations will see $464 million less in 2025 than in 2024 – a year that saw a 1.3 percent decrease from 2023.
In the short run, federal budget cuts aren’t affecting the biotech business, Langer said, since companies tend to rely on funding from investors and the industry was already in a slowdown. The immediate impact is on academia: Harvard Medical School has seen 350 federal grants and contracts terminated by the government, representing about $230 million in funding annually, according to the medical school’s website.
Langer’s lab at MIT has not been affected, but he has heard that a well-known professor from Harvard had to lay off two-thirds of their team, and he has talked to a Nobel Prize winner who lost a grant. “Those are not good signs,” Langer said.
Research is like “shots on goal,” where sometimes a lot of effort can lead to nothing, he said. That makes it hard to choose what investigations to pursue, but “the more money you dump at things intelligently … you have greater chances of having certain things happen. If you have more good people coming at it more different ways, you have a great chance [for] success.”
Langer pointed to the first Trump administration’s race to find a Covid vaccine. Instead of funding one program, the government funded several. The vaccinations developed in the United States and abroad prevented an estimated 14.4 million deaths in a year, according to the National Library of Medicine. “That choice of funding all those things by the government. It just saved a tremendous number of lives,” he said. “You have more of a chance when you bet on more horses, right?”
Hopes and worries
Langer said it’s too early to know the scope of these impacts. He is optimistic that opportunities and new medicines are still on the horizon. “This may be a bit of a downturn, [but] I have every expectation it will come back just like it has before,” he said.
Things he’s watching are advancements in genetic medicines and cellular therapies that could be used to treat cancer and advance regenerative medicine. “Those areas, I’m very excited about,” he said. “I think they’ll make a big difference in the world.”
What Langer is worried about is the stream of misinformation spreading daily, especially misinformation about vaccines.
“Let’s say you’re not going to give people measles injections,” he said. “People will die. That worries me. I think that should worry everybody. Sadly, we may see more people die from certain diseases because of what’s going on in the short run. In the long run, I think throughout history, science has ultimately won.”
This story is part of a partnership between Cambridge Day and the Boston University Department of Journalism.
A stronger
Please consider making a financial contribution to maintain, expand and improve Cambridge Day.
We are now a 501(c)3 nonprofit and all donations are tax deductible.
Please consider a recurring contribution.