Robert Langer on targeted drug delivery for future medicine

How does targeted drug delivery benefit people?
Let’s say somebody has cancer. You’d like the cancer drug to go right to the target – right to the cancer cell – and to no other cell in the body. That would benefit people because the drug would be a lot more effective. It wouldn’t have the side effects that you get when a drug goes all over the body

Right now, if you need to take a drug, the drug goes all over the body. That’s why a lot of times, when we take some drugs, we get side effects, sometimes bad effects. Sometimes we get sick to our stomach. Sometimes we get headaches. It all depends on the drug.

You can use targeted drug delivery as long as you know where you want to go in the body. Let’s say you want to try to treat heart disease, and you want it to go to a blood vessel. We’ve done some work on that as well. There are other diseases as well – inflammatory diseases and so forth – but you’d need to have the right targets in the body.