ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2024
The Young Physician-Scientist Awards (YPSA) recognize physician-scientists who are early in their first faculty appointment and have made notable achievements in their research.
About the awardee
Changwan Ryu, MD, MPH is an assistant professor at the Yale School of Medicine in the Section of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine. After serving as a chief resident at SUNY Upstate Medical University, he came to Yale for his pulmonary and critical care fellowship. Under the mentorship of Dr. Erica Herzog, he began his translational research career investigating circulating biomarkers in interstitial lung disease (ILD), culminating in their seminal work describing the relationship between plasma mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and mortality in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). They have worked to identify an association between mtDNA and poor clinical outcomes in other chronic conditions, including sarcoidosis and scleroderma. Their ground-breaking work has characterized extracellular mtDNA as a convergent biomarker linking divergent disease states.
Dr. Ryu has continued in this arena, where his translational research platform investigates interactions between mtDNA and DNA-sensing pathogen recognition receptors as mediators of fibroproliferative lung disease. His aim is to not only identify novel pathogenic molecular mechanisms driving these conditions, but also to discover new therapeutic approaches to treat patients with these incurable diseases. His work has been recognized with funding from the Parker B. Francis Foundation, Foundation for Sarcoidosis Research, Boehringer-Ingelheim IPF/ILD Discovery Award, Chest Foundation, and NIH/NHLBI with a K08.
Pairing with his research, Dr. Ryu is the associate director of The Yale Lung Repository, where he has modernized efforts to collect, store, and catalog biospecimens from patients with various forms of ILD. Moreover, he has continued in his capacity as a physician-scientist as an attending physician in the Yale ILD Center of Excellence, the only such recognized clinic in the state of Connecticut.