Living Proof Co-founder Dr. Robert Langer, an engineer at MIT who fundamentally changed drug delivery, was awarded £1 million for the Queen Elizabeth Prize. Langer was the first person to engineer polymers to control the delivery of large molecular weight drugs for the treatment of diseases such as cancer and mental illness. His unconventional thinking toppled the established view that controlled-release drug delivery would not work for large molecules like proteins, which are very sensitive to their surroundings.  He is a co-founder, Chief Scientific Advisor and idea generator for the scientific discovery at Living Proof.

“When I started doing a lot of this work in the 1970s, it probably was considered science fiction, in fact a lot of the people who reviewed our grants said we shouldn’t get the funds because it was like fiction,” Langer told BBC News. “But you keep pushing, you keep believing in your ideas and eventually they do become reality.”

Her Majesty The Queen will present the prize to Dr. Langer at Buckingham Palace later this year.

“We congratulate Bob on this huge honor. He is a truly brilliant, out-of-the-box thinker, and we benefit from his vision every day,” says Grace Ray, Living Proof CEO.

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