Doctor's diagnosis: Success

When the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange goes clang, clang, clang this morning, Gilbert Tang can add one more success to his long list of accomplishments.

The 31-year-old from Mississauga has already chocked up an impressive collection, including an intimate dinner with Warren Buffett, the world's richest man, two degrees from Harvard University, two more from the University of Toronto, as well as a promising start in a career in cardiac surgery. Never mind winning – for the first time – both the Harvard Business School's annual Business Plan Contest and the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition in the same year.

It's for this reason Tang is on the trading floor today with his winning team from Harvard Business School. The six-member crew won both competitions for coming up with a creative business plan for Diagnostics for All, a non-profit company that hopes to transform how diseases are diagnosed in the developing world.

"Two weeks after graduation, to get to ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchange?" laughs Tang. "That's very exciting, and something I never expected."

Tang, who just graduated with an MBA, and his team spent months designing a plan to get the non-profit off the ground.

The technology behind Diagnostics for All was developed at Harvard University in the lab of George Whitesides, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology. The diagnostic chip, made of paper and the size of a small postage stamp, can be used to test body fluids, such as sweat, urine or blood, for disease markers.

Not only are the chips portable and cheap to make – they cost roughly 1 cent each – the colour-coded diagnostic component can be easily analyzed and doesn't require special lab equipment.

"You can put the entire diagnostic lab at a patient's finger tip," says Tang. "But we knew you had to make it a business and make it a product and successfully get it out to the people who need it."

The team beat out more than 230 other groups for the MIT contest, the most prestigious in the world. It's the first time, says Tang, that a non-profit idea was awarded the grand prize.

Despite his success in the business world, Tang has come back to the GTA to finish his six-year residency in cardiac surgery at the University of Toronto. He got his MD at U of T in 2002, followed by a master's degree in tissue engineering in 2007. He now has 2  1/2 years to go before he can qualify as a heart surgeon.

"I'm excited to go back to the operating room," he says. "I'm looking forward to feeling that direct doctor-patient relationship. That's why I chose to pursue medicine in the first place."

Tang and his family came to Canada from Hong Kong 19 years ago. He says his science teachers at Glenforest Secondary School in Mississauga sparked his interest in the life sciences, which led him to an undergraduate degree in biochemistry at Harvard University.