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M. J. Friedrich

JAMA. 2005;294:1609-1610.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Cancer research isn’t a traditional career track for a chemical engineer. But Robert Langer, ScD, isn’t an ordinary chemical engineer. After completing his doctoral degree in 1974, he turned down offers from the petroleum industry to take a postdoctoral position with cancer researcher Judah Folkman, MD, at Children’s Hospital, in Boston.

Langer’s task in Folkman’s laboratory was to isolate the first angiogenesis inhibitor (Langer et al. Science. 1976;193:70-72). One crucial aspect of this challenge was to come up with a plastic, or polymer, delivery system that would slowly release these large protein molecules to tissues in a controlled manner.

At the time the general consensus was that only substances of a much smaller size could move through plastic. But Langer invented a device that allowed the slow release of large, medically important molecules from a 3-dimensional polymer matrix (Langer and Folkman. Nature. 1976;263:797-800). The principles he followed . . . [Full Text of this Article]