Forum showcases accomplished cardiovascular physician

Wang Wei, a cardiovascular physician, is a special guest at the Young Elite Scientist Summit at this year's Pujiang Innovation Forum.

Working for Chongqing-based Daping Hospital, a hospital affiliated with the Amy Military Medical University, the 39-year-old physician has brought his findings on cardiac regeneration and focuses on fields like medicine, the cultivation of young medical professionals and the latest achievements in interdisciplinarity.

"The summit is high level with experts from medicine and many other science and technology fields," Wang said.

"I'd like to know the newest interdisciplinary developments, because innovation often comes from cooperation and interdisciplinarity. The new technologies always keep evolving," he added. "Sometimes if a scientific problem is still left to be solved, it might have something to do with the technique or perspective. So through interdisciplinary discussion, we can jump out of our knowledge range and get some enlightenment. The cooperation can also help with dealing with some key scientific problems."

For instance, artificial heart is a result of the interdisciplinarity between medicine and engineering.

"Moreover, if now we need a device controlled by artificial intelligence to solve a medical problem, it should be related to disciplines like medicine, materials science and designing," Wang said. "Then people from different fields can work out the new technology or new products together."

Meanwhile, he also believes clinical research on the basis of big data is important.

According to Wang, Chinese hospitals have huge data volumes as well as rich clinical resources, and big data can help summarize the laws of medicine from them. That covers aspects including the standardization of data, the setup of systems and methods of research, which can be a direction for future medicine industry to go.

After getting his postdoctoral training at Temple University in the United States, he returned to China in 2010. With the support of hospital, he developed a research team focusing on heart repair and regeneration, and seeking new therapies for myocardial infarction and heart failure.

"Cardiovascular research is a challenging field. We focus on myocardial infarction and heart failure due to their high incidence and mortality. Now the public can feel the great harm brought by those diseases," Wang said. "They have the same cause – the massive loss of cardiomyocytes, which eventual leads to death."

In the past, classical pathology tells us that one's cardiomyocytes are non-renewable with a fixed number after his or her birth. In clinical cases, even though one can be saved from a critical condition, the loss of cardiomyocytes will still gradually cause heart failure.

However, Wang's teamwork finding, with animal experiments, supports that adult cardiomyocyte has the ability to proliferate. With high-end technologies, one cardiomyocyte can split into two under certain conditions. Knowing that cardiomyocyte can regenerate but the efficiency is low, they can then try to do something to promote it and raise the efficiency.

Another achievement of the team is stem cell treatment for heart diseases. A problem in such treatment is that the stem cell cannot survive in the ischemic heart tissue. So they "refit" the stem cell to lift the viability.

"It's like improving the seeds into drought-enduring ones to make them survive in dry land," Wang said.

Besides devoting himself to research, Wang take every case of outpatients and inpatients seriously at the hospital, some of whom are foreigners.

In July 2019, an Australian man, whose wife is from Chongqing, suffered acute chest pain during his stay in China and visited Daping Hospital. Like what they do to every chest pain patient, Wang and his colleague in the Chest Pain Center system to diagnose and treat the patient as soon as possible.

Since the man's diagnosis was ST-segment elevated myocardial infarction, which required immediate PCI therapy. But he initially refused the therapy because of worrying about having the surgery-like treatment in foreign land.

"I explained why the immediate PCI therapy can save his life," Wang said. "I told him that our treatments are the same as Australia, the US and the other countries with international standards. And we can even do better because of better training by more cases. After hearing my words, his worry was cleared and he finally agreed to receive the therapy."

The man recovered soon and now when he sees a doctor at the hospital, he chooses Wang's outpatient service.

Beyond his own works, Wang also cares much about the growth of young medical staff and scientific fellows.

"The graduates from medical schools and the young fellows are our future," Wang said. "As a professor and an mentor, I always keep an eye on what support they can get and which policies are beneficial for them."

To create innovation, Wang said it's important for them to develop scientific thinking and command of the new technologies.

But he also warned that they should prevent fickleness and never neglect the importance of basic knowledge.

"As long as you do well on the basics, you can go much further," he said.