BENGALURU: Dr Rohit Shetty took charge as chairman of Narayana Nethralaya on Wednesday. He had unofficially taken charge after the untimely demise of Dr K Bhujang Shetty, founder chairman and managing director of Narayana Nethralaya.
Rohit Shetty (48), the son-in-law of Dr Bhujang Shetty, told TNIE that he would take his father-in-law’s legacy ahead. When health is a challenge today, faith is very important and we will continue to sustain that faith in our patients, he said.
“As I have done my PhD in advanced therapy, we will also work on strengthening gene editing and gene therapy. We are also developing six to seven new drugs that will reduce the cost of treatment and make it faster. An R&D team of 70 scientists is working on this,” he added.
He also aims to take ahead Dr Bhujang Shetty’s vision of therapies on genetic and neuro molecules as well as reversing diabetes using food as medicine. Dr Bhujang had been practising the same and there were studies that showed it to be successful. Around 2,000 patients had even enrolled for it.
He added that the hospital will also work on introducing cutting-edge technology for better treatment of patients. Dr Rohit Shetty was the only Indian featured in The Ophthalmologist Power List 2023, and has been practising refractive surgery for 14 years.
He has been vice-chairman of the hospital for 12 years before taking over as chairman. He has over 200 publications in peer-reviewed journals and is also a reviewer for many indexed journals. He has worked extensively on pain management after photo-refractive keratectomy, the influence of stromal molecular markers on corneal ectasia and risk-scoring systems to predict ectasia after refractive surgery.