Wai Hong Wilson Tang, MD
Staff
Cardiovascular Medicine
Location: Cleveland Clinic Main Campus
Research
As a clinician-scientist, the goal of my research is to investigate mechanistic determinants of cardiovascular disease, particular in human heart failure and cardiomyopathy. One of the primary objectives is to understand the mechanisms to which inflammation and cellular processes that promote disease progression, and the protective mechanisms that are operational to counteract these processes. The natural extension is to detect those at risk, thereby ultimately preventing the development of heart failure and cardiomyopathy.
Biography
W. H. Wilson Tang, MD, is Research Director, and staff cardiologist in the Section of Heart Failure and Cardiac Transplantation Medicine in the Sydell and Arnold Miller Family Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute at the Cleveland Clinic. Dr. Tang is Professor of Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University.
Dr. Tang is a clinician-scientist interested in clinical translational research, with joint appointments with the Department of Cardiovascular & Metabolic Sciences and the Genomic Medicine Institute at Cleveland Clinic's Lerner Research Institute. He leads the Cleveland GeneBank Study as well as the Cleveland Heart and Metabolic Prevention Study to investigate novel mechanisms in the development of heart diseases. Dr. Tang also has leadership role in the National Institutes of Health (NIH)-sponsored Clinical and Translational Sciences Collaborative, overseeing the Hub Research Capacity and directs the Cleveland Clinic Clinical Research Unit. Dr. Tang’s current research interests include the role of counter-regulatory mechanisms in the development and progression of heart failure, integrative genomics and epigenetics in cardiomyopathies, and metabolomics in cardio-renal physiology. Dr. Tang has authored over 630 published peer-reviewed manuscripts in medical and scientific journals and chapters in medical textbooks. He currently serves in the Editorial Boards for Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC) Heart Failure, JACC Cardio-Oncology, Circulation Heart Failure, and American Heart Journal. He was elected as member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI) in 2013 and Association of American Physicians (AAP) in 2018, both national honor societies for physician scientists for his contributions in medical research.
Education & Professional Highlights
Education & Fellowships
Fellowship - Cleveland Clinic
Cardiology, Heart Failure Transplantation
Cleveland, OH USA
2004
Fellowship - Cleveland Clinic
Advanced heart failure/transplant
Cleveland, OH USA
2004
Fellowship - Cleveland Clinic
Cardiology
Cleveland, OH USA
2003
Fellowship - Cleveland Clinic
Cardiovascular Medicine
Cleveland, OH USA
2003
Fellowship - Stanford University School of Medicine
Cardiovascular Medicine
Stanford, CA USA
2000
Fellowship - Stanford University School of Medicine
Postdoctoral research fellowship
Stanford, CA USA
2000
Residency - Stanford University Medical Center
Internal Medicine
Palo Alto, CA USA
1999
Residency - Stanford University Medical Center
Stanford, CA USA
1999
Residency - Stanford University Medical Center
Internal Medicine
Stanford, CA USA
1999
Internship - Stanford University Medical Center
Internal Medicine
Palo Alto, CA USA
1997
Medical Education - Harvard Medical School
Boston, MA USA
1996
Medical Education - Harvard Medical School
Boston, MA USA
1996
Undergraduate - Brown University
Natural Sciences
Providence, RI USA
1992
Professional Highlights
- Research Director, Section of Heart Failure and Cardiac Transplantation Medicine, Sydell and Arnold Miller Family Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute at the Cleveland Clinic
- Director, NIH Clinical and Translational Sciences Collaborative Hub Research Capacity, Cleveland Clinical and Translational Sciences Collaborative
- Medical Director, Center for Cardiovascular Diagnostics and Prevention, Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, Lerner Research Institute, Cleveland Clinic
Certifications
- Internal Medicine - Cardiovascular Disease
Awards & Honors
- Fellow, American College of Cardiology, 2005
- Fellow, American Heart Association, 2006
- Elected member, American Society of Clinical Investigation, 2013
- Top Doctors for Cardiovascular Diseases (2012-9) and Cancer (Cardiovascular Disease, 2014-9)
- 2016 Maria and Sam Miller Professional Excellence Award for Scientific Achievement in Clinical Research
- Fellow, Heart Failure Society of America, 2017
- Elected member, Association of American Physicians, 2018
Innovations & Patents
- Research funding from National Institutes of Health
Memberships
- American College of Cardiology
- American Heart Association
- Heart Failure Society of America
- International Society of Heart and Lung Transplantation
- American Society of Clinical Investigations
- International Society of Cardiomyopathies, Myocarditis, and Heart Failure
Research
As a clinician-scientist, my goal is to investigate mechanistic determinants of human cardiovascular diseases. One of the primary objectives is to understand the mechanisms through which inflammatory and metabolic imbalance can contribute to disease progression in heart failure and cardiomyopathy. Specifically, our laboratory has investigated myeloperoxidase, ceruloplasmin, and dysregulated arginine metabolites, and cardiotonic steroids as mediators of nitrative stress in human heart failure, correlating physiologic alterations with metabolites and proteins measured by mass spectroscopy techniques or immunoassays in blood samples or enzyme expression in explanted human hearts. My laboratory has also extended efforts to understand how the heart interacts with other organs such as the kidneys and the lungs in the setting of heart failure. We are particularly interested in exploring counter-regulatory mechanisms that are operative to protect end-organ damage, which may provide clinical opportunity to identify future targets for preventive therapy. Areas of interest include high-density lipoprotein-associated paraoxonases, angiotensin-converting enzyme 2, dimethylarginine dimethylaminohydrolase (DDAH), and anti-inflammatory cellular autoimmune responses. As Clinical Core Director for the GeneBank at Cleveland Clinic and part of the collaborative Myocardial Applied Genomics Network (MAGNet), genetic, proteomic, and metabolomic links to pathogenic pathways in human heart diseases and heart failure are being explored. Research efforts are also conducted at the Clinical Research Unit with human subjects, using specific laboratory techniques to explore the clinical application of existing and novel biomarkers and/or imaging to link with physiologic understanding of the spectrum of human heart failure and cardiomyopathy.
Our Team
Selected Publications
View publications for Wai Hong Wilson Tang, MD
(Disclaimer: This search is powered by PubMed, a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. PubMed is a third-party website with no affiliation with Cleveland Clinic.)
Tang WH, Tong W, Troughton RW, et al. Prognostic Value and Echocardiographic Determinants of Plasma Myeloperoxidase Levels in Chronic Heart Failure. J Am Coll Cardiol 2007; 49: 2364-70.
Tang WH, Tong W, Shrestha K, et al. Differential Effects of Arginine Methylation on Diastolic Dysfunction and Disease Progression in Patients with Chronic Systolic Heart Failure. Eur Heart J 2008; 29: 2506-13.
Tang WH, Wang Z, Cho L, et al. Diminished Global Arginine Bioavailability as Metabolomic Profile of Increased Cardiovascular Risk. J Am Coll Cardiol 2009; 53(22): 2061-7.
Tang WH, Wu Y, Mann S, et al. Diminished Anti-oxidant Activity of High-Density Lipoprotein-Associated Proteins in Systolic Heart Failure. Circ Heart Fail 2011; 4:59-64.
Tang WH, Wu Y, Hartiala J, et al. Clinical and Genetic Association of Serum Ceruloplasmin with Cardiovascular Risk. Arterioscler Thromb Vasc Biol 2012; 32:516-22.
Tang WH, Wang Z, Levison BS, et al. Intestinal Microbiota Metabolism of Phosphatidylcholine and Incident Cardiac Risks. N Engl J Med 2012; in press.
Careers
Research News
Recent cardiovascular research at Cleveland Clinic examined topics such as the gut microbiome connection to the heart, COVID-19’s impact on cardiac event risk and improving cardiac imaging.
W.H. Wilson Tang, MD discusses the importance of metabolite research in maintaining health and what researchers have yet to discover.