Doctor makes her mark in nuclear medicine research
Tian Mei wanted to be a doctor since she was young, and now she has exceeded her childhood dream.
A clinical doctor and PhD instructor at the Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Tian and her team have created a series of innovative molecular imaging techniques, focusing on the basic research and clinical application of positron emission tomography (PET), which provides promising support for early disease detection, new drug development and stem cell research.
Born in Taiyuan, North China’s Shanxi province, Tian, 44, enjoys international recognition. She is active in nuclear medicine and molecular imaging research, and has just come back from a meeting in Vienna held by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
She and other top experts in the field were there to discuss the development and further application of nuclear medicine and to draft global guidelines.
She is the only Chinese expert in nuclear medicine who has been invited for such a meeting to date, according to Tian.
“Nuclear medicine and molecular imaging is one of the most sophisticated branches of medical science. It is very promising in improving disease diagnosis and treatment,” says Tian.
“I love what I do, because my work is meaningful and helps save lives.”
PET is significantly instructive in medical researches, because it uses radio-labeled tracers to visualize specific biological processes at the cell and molecular level, and can show details of cells, tissues and organs in experiments.
The United States started using PET scanner in the 1970s, and has been leading in the area since then. Japan and some other developed countries, including Germany, also have advanced research in the field.
But despite its great progress over the past years, China still lags behind developed countries, not only in the number of PET devices in use, but also in manufacturing ability, Tian says.
China has only a few hundred of PET devices, while in the US, the number is thousands, and China cannot produce some of the machines’ key components, which have to be imported.
As a university teacher, Tian also feels compelled to broaden students’ horizons, making use of her overseas experience and networking.
She teaches English-language courses, and often invites internationally acclaimed scientists to the university to lectures and academic conferences, such as the soon-to-open Hangzhou International Molecular Imaging Conference 2016.
Tian became interested in nuclear medicine when she was at Shanxi Medical University in the early 1990s. There she received the bachelor’s and master’s degrees.
Her performance during an academic meeting in Xi’an, Shaanxi province in 1999 impressed Endo Keigo, a world-leading expert in nuclear medicine and PET and pro- fessor of Gunma University in Japan. He then invited her to apply for the university’s doctorate program.
At that time, PET was such a new medical technology that there were less than 100 PET machines in the world, and the Japanese university was among the best institutes in PET research and application.
Tian cherished the opportunity, and studied diligently. She earned her doctorate one year faster than usual, wining the university’s new investigator award in 2004.
She also won the Japanese Society of Nuclear Medicine’s Asia and Oceania Distinguished Young Investigator Award in 2002, and Radiological Society of North America’s International Young Academic Award in 2003.
In 2005, she went to the US for further studies successively at Harvard University and at the MD Anderson Cancer Center. Experience in the US broadened her horizon in nuclear medicine researches, says Tian.
In Japan, most of her study and work focused on the clinical application of PET in disease diagnosis, but in the US, her research expanded to new drug development and stemcell tracking.
She accepted an offer from Zhejiang University and started working as a researcher there in 2011 under the 1,000 Talents Plan, a Chinese government-initiated global-talent program. She is satisfied with the support she receives.
The central government has attached great importance in nuclear-medicine development in the 13th Five-Year Plan, and Tian believes that is a sign that research in the field in China will thrive.
“Nuclear weapons kill people but nuclear medicine saves lives. People should not get scared at hearing the word ‘nuclear’,” says Tian.