▎Honor

Distinguished Prof. Sung-Jan Lin of the Department of Biomedical Engineering leads the Lab of Tissue Engineering and Regeneration at NTU as Principal Investigator. His lab members, Postdoctoral Fellow Yueh-Feng Wu and master students Men-Wei Lin and Shang-Wei Hung, formed a team and won the School of Engineering E×S Challenge Award at the 2nd Engineering School E×S Challenge organized by Tokyo Institute of Technology.

The E×S Challenge encourages students and young researchers to propose feasible business ideas based on engineering sciences and technologies that could help create a sustainable society. The competition focuses on realizing goals that make sustainable development a reality by exploring the most innovative and creative ideas and assisting the teams in bringing their proposals to fruition—the feasibility of the proposals is the evaluation criterion.

The E×S Challenge consists of three stages, including PITCH, STORM, and LAUNCH. Prof. Sung-Jan Lin’s team entered the competition with a proposal to develop a drug that prevents corneal endothelial cell loss, winning the first prize in the PITCH stage. In the STORM stage, the team collaborated with students from Tokyo Institute of Technology and proposed a project on “AI image diagnosis of cataracts and drug development to prevent complications of cataract surgery.” The team stood out in the LAUNCH stage and won the School of Engineering E×S Challenge Award and prize money totaling 1 million Japanese Yen among the 12 teams. The team’s research was also supported by the Innovative Translational Research: Novel Targets in Human Health and Diseases Program of the National Science and Technology Council.