Hoag doctor, recruited from UC Irvine, has big plans for digestive health
Dr. Kenneth J. Chang called himself an “anchor baby,” born in New York City to immigrant parents in 1959.
With excellent grades as a high school valedictorian, he attended Brown University, which had a medical program.
Between his third and fourth year of medical school, Chang had an experience that would, in turn, anchor his beliefs in his profession.
He joined medical missionaries for a year on the southern tip of Taiwan. Chang said the poor fishing village had a 40-bed hospital but few other resources.
“They had to rig up everything,” he said. “They had to improvise, innovate everything. They used the nylon from fishing nets for suture material, they used fishing hooks for needles. It was crazy … but that was the beginning of my life motto, innovate out of compassion.
“If someone’s in front of you and they can’t afford something, they have a problem that can’t be solved, think out of the box, innovate, come up with something. I just caught that spirit, that bug.”
Chang, now 65, still carries that vision as he gets settled in his next adventure.
The Yorba Linda resident was hired in June as the executive medical director of Hoag’s Digestive Health Institute, one of seven institutes at Hoag. He said his goals aligned closely with Hoag’s — research and discovery, teaching and training the next generation of physicians and providing world-class care accessible to everybody.
“With the next five years, 10 years, whatever time I have left, will joining Hoag help me move the dream quicker and faster?” Chang asked himself. “My answer was yes, because Hoag, their heart is in the right place and their reputation and brand is so strong in the community.”
Chang comes to Hoag from UC Irvine, where he joined the clinical faculty in 1991. Since then he has built and launched UCI’s Comprehensive Digestive Disease Center and Digestive Health Institute, while publishing nearly 500 scientific papers.
Digestive health is important to overall health. Chang can rattle off the numbers — the second-leading cause of cancer-related deaths is colon cancer. No. 3 is pancreatic cancer, No. 6 is liver and bile duct cancer, and No. 11 is esophageal cancer.
But Hoag’s physicians are excited about a new tool in their toolbox. Earlier this month, Hoag announced the use of the HistoSonics Edison Histotripsy System for treating liver cancer.
Histotripsy is a noninvasive cancer treatment option approved last year by the FDA. Hoag is one of the first centers in the world to use this treatment, said Dr. Trushar Patel, who specializes in vascular and interventional radiology and has been working for about five years to bring the histotripsy technology to Hoag.
“For the first time, we’re able to target a tumor without messing up or destroying or interfering with any of the adjacent tissue,” Patel said. “If I treat something in the liver, it’s not going to affect the bowel that sits on top of it, it’s not going to affect the skin, it’s not going to affect any structure.”
The analogy he used was an opera singer using just the right frequency of voice to shatter a wine glass. That’s how precise histotripsy is. It creates microbubbles that burst the tumor and liquefy it, without generating heat.
“The amazing thing is that it leaves the actual protein structure intact,” Patel said. “Before, when you took out a tumor, you were removing everything.”
Chang said clinical trials are suggesting that if you apply histotripsy to one cancer tumor in the liver, the other cancer tumors may also respond and shrink through an immunologic effect.
“If you treat [Nos.] 1 or 2, but 4, 5 and 6 also disappear, that would be the home run,” he said. “That’s what’s intriguing and interesting, that possibility.”
Hoag is readying its Sun Family Digestive Health Pavilion in Irvine, part of the Sun Family Campus expansion. Cancer and digestive health services will be housed together in a 160,000-square foot pavilion, Chang said, which will include inpatient and outpatient wings and integrated care.
The new space goes along with Chang’s vision of four centers of excellence: a weight and metabolic center, heartburn and foregut center, digestive oncology center and colon health and inflammatory bowel disease center.
“These centers are often physical centers, like you walk into a physical center, but they’re going to canvas the entire need of Orange County and beyond,” he said. “Patients will have an integrated system to help provide for them, where everyone knows what everyone else is doing. It isn’t like the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing … We can truly offer an integrated, comprehensive approach to the patient.”
All the latest on Orange County from Orange County.
Get our free TimesOC newsletter.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Daily Pilot.
