This content originally appeared in MIT Technology Review.
One Young World is delighted to share that OYW Ambassador Ahmad Nabeel of Kuwait has won the highly prestigious MIT Tech Review Innovators Under 35 Award in the MENA region. The award will be presented by HH The Crown Prince of Dubai.
Previous winners include Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, Mark Zuckerberg, Founder of Facebook and the founders of Tesla, PayPal, Twitter and Spotify, among others.
Ahmad is a 31-year-old multi-award-winning physician, innovator, and researcher from Kuwait. He finished his medical education in Cairo in 2015 and worked at Al-Amiri hospital for 2 years after getting accepted in one of the Royal College of Surgeons training programs.
He won the award for his surgical optics innovation, Klens, that enhances the clarity of the visual field of the surgeon during laparoscopic and robotic surgery. It serves a long-term unmet need for a wide variety of surgical procedures. Not only does it improve safety and efficacy – but it addresses a basic inefficiency surgeons have been hindered by since the laparoscope was first invented – having to remove the scope to clean the lens each time it becomes occluded, and this happens very frequently.
The problem is even more prominent in robotic surgery, as retracting the camera is more complicated and there is usually no scrubbed in staff near the patient to clean the camera. Both compromised vision and withdrawing the camera out of the patient, put patients at risk, as they increase the chances for surgical errors significantly. This puts the surgeon in a dilemma; to retract the scope and disrupt the flow of the surgery or keep operating with compromised vision. Can you imagine driving your car in stormy weather, with no front windshield wipers; having to step out of the vehicle to manually clean the window every few minutes?
This is what surgeons go through daily in the operating theatre since the laparoscope was invented a century ago, and literally, lives are at stake. This innovation aims to change the way laparoscopic and robotic surgeries are done forever and has the potential to positively impact 15 million patients and procedures every year.
Congratulations Ahmad!
