By Nina Huang
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
Dr. Ricky Wang (Picture from the College of Washington)
This 12 months’s College of Washington (UW) Medication Innovator of the 12 months, Dr. Ricky Wang, is innovating for higher affected person outcomes along with his newest expertise serving to to diagnose illnesses by simply taking a photograph of your eye.
Wang, UW professor of bioengineering and ophthalmology is the recipient of the 2023 UW Medication Inventor of the 12 months award and shall be honored at a reception on Nov. 1. The award acknowledges excellent UW scientists whose innovations have had a serious impression on each human well being and our native financial system.
Wang additionally holds the George and Martina Kren Endowed Chair in ophthalmology analysis on the UW.
Wang was born and raised within the rural areas of Changzhou, China in 1965.
The school entrance exams in China had simply resumed after the Cultural Revolution and Wang was not sure what to check in highschool.
“My father chosen that path for me. He thought precision engineering and precision instrumentation was actually wanted for many industrial functions,” he mentioned.
Wang adopted his father’s recommendation and adopted in his engineering footsteps. Wang’s father was a water engineer coping with water administration.
Thus, Wang studied precision engineering at Tianjin College, the place he obtained each his Bachelor in Engineering and Grasp of Science levels.
He needed to additional his training and was additionally drawn to Glasgow’s business. That’s what piqued his curiosity to check there. He moved there in 1993 to get his Ph.D. in optical info processing from the College of Glasgow.
“That’s the place I began to work utilizing optics and light-weight for biomedical functions,” he mentioned.
After Glasgow, Wang secured his first college place on the College of Keele in England. It was a place throughout the medical faculty they usually had been all in favour of making use of optics and light-weight by mobile stage and scale decision of the human physique.
“That was the start line once I began to interact with biomedicine. After I began, it was continuous as a result of it actually obtained me excited,” he added.
Wang taught, performed analysis, and created his personal lab throughout his 5 years in Keele. He then went on to show and create his analysis lab at Cranfield College.
After three years there, Wang moved over to america to show and begin his lab at Oregon Well being and Science College the place he was for one more 5 years.
“I actually need to push my applied sciences in my lab to be clinically translated so it may be used to profit sufferers. That’s an important drive for me to maneuver,” he mentioned.
Wang shared that the setting in america to conduct analysis has been excellent and vibrant.
“You’ve got soil right here to make your goals come true,” he shared.
Wang finally moved to Seattle and has been instructing and conducting analysis on the UW since 2010.
He described the UW as an enormous setting for medical translation to use lab applied sciences to the human physique.
As well as, UW has a really sturdy tradition of working with clinicians within the analysis labs and has helped to use his analysis quicker to the clinic settings.
“I’m in bioengineering and our job is actually to use the applied sciences within the lab for medical use to profit the sufferers,” he added.
Wang’s lab is chargeable for the invention of optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA, or optical microangiography), an imaging approach able to 3D imaging of blood circulation inside microcirculatory tissue beds in vivo. This method has revolutionized how folks world wide obtain imaginative and prescient care.
Wang works alongside many good minds, however one individual specifically is somebody he actually admires.
Fellow UW colleague, Dr. Murray Johnstone, ophthalmologist and glaucoma specialist,conjures up Wang and what he’s engaged on now.
“His enthusiasm conjures up what I’m doing now,” Wang mentioned.
All through his profession, Wang’s proudest accomplishment has been the flexibility to make use of optics to take a look at microcirculation, which is the blood circulation in capillaries.
Wang hopes to proceed pushing applied sciences developed in his lab for additional medical use to profit and enhance affected person outcomes with an emphasis on utilizing optics to take a look at mobile stage within the human physique to diagnose illnesses.
There’s a brand new smartphone app referred to as Specam X, being developed in his lab to assist diagnose sure medical situations by taking a photograph.
Considered one of Wang’s postdoc students, Chinghua He, helped develop the app. He began working with Wang in 2018.
The app can be utilized at a low value (or at no cost), however it might be helpful in low useful resource settings reminiscent of creating nations to assist enhance affected person outcomes.
For instance, they’re presently conducting a medical trial at a hospital in Changchun in northeast China, an space the place alcoholism and liver issues are quite common.
As an alternative of getting to attract blood and await the lab outcomes, one can use the prototype smartphone to take a photograph of the affected person’s eyeball and from the photograph, they can predict the bilirubin ranges.
Wang shared that the trials thus far have been very correct and profitable. He mentioned that they’ll additionally use the app to diagnose jaundice in new child infants.
“Dr. Ricky Wang is all the time specializing in really translating applied sciences within the clinic collaborations and contributions to most people, and I feel that’s very significant. I feel he’ll proceed to contribute drastically to scientific analysis,” He mentioned.
He described Wang as a frontrunner who has a collaborative fashion and somebody who works intently along with his staff to construct a productive tradition within the lab.
Wang’s impression is undoubtedly widespread.
Princess Imoukhuede, Hunter and Dorothy Simpson Endowed Chair and professor in UW bioengineering, wrote in an e-mail to the BioE neighborhood, “This outstanding recognition is a testomony to Dr. Wang’s distinctive expertise and groundbreaking contributions to the bioscience sector and to UW. His industrial licensing successes have each expanded the boundaries of translation and have the potential to positively impression quite a few lives. We’re extremely proud to have such a superb thoughts amongst us.”
And when Wang isn’t in his lab engaged on life-changing medical applied sciences, he’s often out in nature mountain climbing along with his household.
Nina may be reached at data@nwasianweekly.com.
