CLARKS SUMMIT — At just 17 years old, Manan Pancholy knows the career path he would like to follow.
Like his two parents before him, he wants to become a doctor.
And with his first patent – for a cardiac catheter – already published this month, it’s safe to say he’s well on his way to not only achieving that goal, but revolutionizing patient care along the way. .
The Abington Heights high school student has been “monitoring and conducting biomedical research” in his spare time at the Scranton Regional Hospital with Dr. Nishant Sethi.
“I have been very involved in research through Dr. Sethi and Regional as well as through the Sigma Xi Research Honor Society,” Pancholy said.
During one of these observation days, Pancholy observed Sethi in the operating room. Sethi used a catheter to open a patient’s blood vessel for diagnostic purposes. Catheters, as Pancholy explained, are used for a variety of procedures, diagnostics, and/or interventions and are generally “fairly simple in nature.”
“And so,” Pancholy said, “you’re trying to stick this guidewire through this catheter into a blood vessel that often has a lot of twists…so with that, I noticed there were a lot more difficulty.”
Pancholy applied his knowledge of physics from school and realized that by changing the structure of the catheter and the way it is pushed into the blood vessel, the process could be much easier.
Giving the very example that spurred his idea, he said: “To imagine this, let’s say there’s a spiral staircase…and if you run a ladder through that, it won’t exactly work from the top of the staircase. stairway down. But if you make the ladder like a spiral, or even like a rug, if you make the rug spiral, it’s going to be able to fit on the stairs.
So Pancholy redesigned the catheter with angles and bends, like a zigzag or a wave, allowing the doctor to adapt and navigate the twists and turns of a blood cell more easily, making catheterization procedures much more easy for the doctor and the patient.
When it came time to patent his new idea for a corkscrew coronary catheter, Pancholy knew it would be a process. But he also noted that his father, Dr. Samir Pancholy, had 23 of his own patents, so that was it.
“I had pitched my idea to this patent attorney and I was very lucky that he liked the idea and helped me through this process of working with the USPTO examiner ( United States Patent and Trademark Office) and we have gone from filing the patent is now being issued.
Already an innovator before his 18th birthday or high school graduation, Pancholy hopes to continue this trend in his career path.
“I aspire to a career in medicine, as a physician, but I want to do more than just help patients at the bedside. I also want to innovate and manufacture medical devices that contribute to this process,” he said.
His personal motto, he noted, is “I live to lead, serve, teach and learn from others. And I feel like medicine allows me to employ all of those values and really serve others, whether it’s like leading a medical team and serving directly, feeling a patient, constantly teaching and learning through this process of research, and teach people about my device so they can better implement it in patient care.
Pancholy, who also has a strong interest in biostatistics as well as medicine, plans to explore both in greater depth in college. Although he doesn’t have a number one school of choice, he has already applied to several such as Brown University, George Washington University, and Penn State, all of which offer DSMB programs that allow accepted high school students to to be directly admitted to the faculty of medicine. He also applied to several more traditional pre-med programs like Johns Hopkins and the University of Pennsylvania.
He offered immense gratitude to the doctors at Regional, such as Sethi and Dr. Deepika Kalisetti, and of course, to his parents, the aforementioned Dr. Samir Pancholy and his mother, Dr. Dipti Pancholy.
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