Bob Langer may be the last, best hope for aging rockers. Just ask Roger Daltrey, The Who's lead singer.
Langer, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist whose work has created two dozen biotech startups, is developing a gel that can vibrate up to 200 times a second —replicating the action of human vocal cords — to rejuvenate the damaged voices of singers such as Daltrey and Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, both of whom have contributed funding for the project, along with actress Julie Andrews.
More than 13,000 people diagnosed each year in the United States with throat tumors may be helped by the efforts of the singers, the scientist and the surgeon who brought them together, Harvard University’s Steven Zeitels. Langer and Zeitels plan to test the gel in a cancer patient for the first time in 2012.
“Unless you’ve been touched personally, it’s difficult to see, but there are millions of people who have no voice whatsoever,” said Daltrey, who was operated on for precancerous lesions in his throat two years ago, and couldn’t speak at all for two weeks.
The gel will be injected into the vocal cords. Once there, it behaves the same way as the uninjured membrane, responding to breath and muscles tension by vibrating as if it was the real thing, Zeitels said. The research has been funded by the nonprofit patient organization, The Institute of Laryngology and Voice Restoration, where Andrews is an honorary chairwoman.
‘Sound of Music’
The research, which began in the 1990s, was accelerated after Zeitels, 53, a professor of laryngeal surgery at Harvard Medical School in Boston, took over treatment of Andrews, the 76-year-old star of “The Sound of Music,” after she underwent surgery in 1997 to remove nodules on her vocal cords.
That operation, by another surgeon, left her unable to sing, said Zeitels, who is also a surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital, in a telephone interview.
Daltrey, 67, and Tyler, 63, were also Zeitels’ patients and have supported his research into how best to repair damaged throat tissue, the doctor said in a telephone interview. After seeking advice from a number of scientific experts, he was directed to Langer’s MIT laboratory in Cambridge, Mass.
No matter who Zeitels spoke to about the challenges inherent in his work, he got the same answer, he said: “If you’re going to get this achieved, Bob Langer is the person to go to.”
A chemical engineer by training, Langer, 63, is best known for his 1976 discovery of factors in cartilage that limit blood vessel growth, and for creating new ways to deliver them slowly over time. That work led directly to anti-cancer drugs that work by starving tumors of their blood supply, including Roche Holding AG (ROG)’s Avastin. It also was key in helping to create the time-release drug business.
