Qian Jiang, former Johns Hopkins’ eye institute expert, joins hospital in China

Professor Qian Jiang, a senior eye expert at Johns Hopkins University in the United States, has moved back to China full time to pursue research on eye transplants.

For more than two decades, Qian built and ran the genetic data hub at Johns Hopkins’ renowned Wilmer Eye Institute. He was welcomed at a ceremony on October 5 at Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital in Hangzhou, part of Zhejiang University, the hospital said.

At the ceremony, Qian said he would also work on “virtual cells” – computer models that mimic real cells so scientists can test how they might respond to drugs or disease without lab experiments.

He said he would draw on the doctors and specialists at Zhejiang University and its hospital to turn lab research into earlier diagnosis and new drugs for patients. He also hopes to bring computer-driven biology and eye medicine closer together.

The South China Morning Post has contacted Qian for comment.

At Johns Hopkins, Qian’s team wrote computer programmes to study how genes are switched on and off in the retina, the light-sensing tissue at the back of the eye. Knowing which genes control each type of cell and what goes wrong in disease could lead to better ways to prevent, diagnose and treat blindness.

01:38

Chinese team aims to put ‘smart’ diabetes probiotic on US shelves within 2 years

Qian held one of the institute’s endowed professorships, which Johns Hopkins calls its highest form of recognition for a professor. His lab had won more than US$8 million in grants from the US National Institutes of Health since 2004, according to the agency’s grant database.

He has published more than 200 papers, including in leading journals Science and Cell, and other scientists have cited his work more than 19,000 times, according to the hospital.

Qian studied at Shanghai Jiao Tong University between 1987 and 1991, according to his LinkedIn page, and he earned a master’s degree at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Biochemistry in Shanghai.

He then obtained his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Germany and did postdoctoral research at Yale University from 2000 to 2002, before joining Johns Hopkins.

His new home has American roots of its own. Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital was built with money from Hong Kong film and television mogul Run Run Shaw and the Zhejiang provincial government. It opened in 1994 with help from Loma Linda University in California, which brought American-style medicine and management to Hangzhou.

At Qian’s welcome ceremony, the hospital’s president, Cai Xiujun, hung a staff badge around his neck.

“Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital is an open and inclusive hospital,” Cai, a surgeon who was elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences last year, told Zhejiang outlet Tide News last year. “As long as people are good enough, we should recruit talent without sticking to convention.”

According to the hospital, it has ranked in the top 1 per cent of China’s major public hospitals six times in a government review.