Chan Q. Wang of Zuga Medical
Meet Dr. Chan Q. Wang, founder of Zuga Medical, a biotech company with four employees that designs, manufactures and markets innovative dental implant systems. The patent-pending system allows dental professionals to reduce chair time, eliminate outsourced patient and laboratory services, and allow general dentist to perform the complete patient service with fewer visits.
What is your background?
I was a practicing dentist and maxillofacial surgeon for eight years at Huashan Hospital in Shanghai China. In Cleveland I’ve been a researcher in the medical and bio-pharmaceutical fields at the
Cleveland Clinic and
Athersys and I managed my own dental office, Noble Dental Care from 2003 to 2013.
How did you come up with the idea for the dental implants?
When I managed the dental practice, a patient wanted to get implants, but we didn’t offer implants at that time and the patient didn’t want to go to a new doctor. Then I found out the implant system at the time was too complicated for a general dentist to do, so I started designing a simplified implant system.
Why is Cleveland an ideal city for Zuga Medical?
Cleveland has a strong biomedical hub that provides access to key elements a biomedical company needs to grow. Those elements include access to world-class research and medical institutions, access to funding and access to accelerators that help connect start-up and emerging biomedical businesses with the myriad of resources needed to thrive.
What is the biggest struggle or hurdle you had to overcome and how did you overcome it?
The hardest hurdle was putting a management team together. It took me five years to bring four talented management team members together. Cleveland is such a biotech rich community that I was able to connect with our CEO Steve Cornelius and CFO Howard Becker through
BioEnterprise and
JumpStart.
What has given you the greatest sense of pride in your company?
To see Zuga Medical achieve our goal and vision that a general dentist could place a clinically preferred implant to replace bridge work. I was also proud to know that our target market of dentists likes our product.
What is the best patient/client compliment you’ve heard?
Dr. Stuart Katz, who is president of The
Greater Cleveland Dental Society, told us after recently placing two Zuga implants in a patient, “The Zuga implant is even easier than a crown preparation.”
Interview by Karin Connelly