Recently, one of the foreign academicians elected to the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences is Dr. Ouyang, the chief physician from Fuwai Hospital of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences.
This new foreign academician, in 2004, worked with Dr. Xu, a professor of Wuhan Textile University, to jointly develop the world's first polyurethane composite material "Three-layer Biomimetic Structure Artificial Blood Vessel", which won the second prize of the National Technology Invention Award.
In 2021, Dr. Xu was elected as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and Dr. Ouyang was elected as a foreign academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences this year.
Artificial blood vessels with a diameter of more than 6 mm have been popularized in the world, but the development of small-diameter blood vessels less than 6 mm is still a difficult problem.
"The technical bottleneck is the material problem." Dr. Ouyang introduced that at that time, the most popular material for experimental artificial blood vessels in the world was polyurethane. This material has good elasticity, but it has shortcomings such as being too soft and easy to bleed when sutured.
One day in 2004, Dr. Ouyang saw a paper on silk biopowder on the website. He thought that this material had good biocompatibility and might be a suitable material for making small-diameter blood vessels. He immediately contacted the paper’s author. Author Dr. Xu, professor of Wuhan Textile University.
Ouyang Chenxi asked Xu Weilin to develop the materials, and the two scholars hit it off.
After more than half a year, after more than 100 animal experiments, they creatively used polyurethane and silk powder as the basic materials, imitating the three-layer structure of human blood vessels, and developed a high bionic small-diameter artificial blood vessel with the same structure and similar functions as human blood vessels. .
In order to verify the experimental effect, Dr. Ouyang implanted a section of artificial blood vessel with a diameter of 4 mm into the carotid arteries of 9 puppies. A year later, the removed blood vessels were still unobstructed.
In 2008, the world's first polyurethane composite material "Three-layer Biomimetic Structure Artificial Blood Vessel" jointly developed by the two won the second prize of the National Technology Invention Award for the corresponding scientific research project, and subsequently obtained the national patent certification.
Turn achievements into products, benefiting tens of millions of people
In 2009, Dr.Ouyang joined WHYS Biotechnology Corporation, focusing on the research and development and production of polyurethane artificial blood vessel products.
At present, WHYS is the only artificial blood vessel in China and the world's leading artificial blood vessel that mimics the human body's own arterial structure. It has been approved by the national green approval channel for innovative medical devices and will enter clinical trials in 2020.
Phased controlled trials of surgery in the fields of aortic disease, arteriovenous fistula, and peripheral vascular disease have shown that the artificial blood vessel can reduce operation time by an average of nearly 2 hours, and discharge time from 9 days to 6 days.
He said, "If you are only a doctor, you will have more than 10,000 surgeries in your lifetime; if you develop good medical products, you can save millions of people; and if you can build a platform to help more doctors realize the transformation of results , then the benefit can be said to be tens of millions of people.”
Before the age of 30, Dr. Ouyang had accumulated 500 surgical experience during his Ph.D. at the Medical University of Hannover, Germany.