TEACHER
Date:29 July (Friday)
Time: 9:00 – 10:30 (GMT+8)
Research Fellow/Professor/CEO
Academia Sinica, AcroCyte Therapeutics
Dr. Chang is a Research Fellow at the Genomics Research Center, Academia Sinica and the CEO and founder of AcroCyte Therapeutics. She is also an Adjunct Professor of the Department of Chemical Engineering, and an affiliated Member of the Precision Health and Integrated Diagnostics Center at Stanford University. In 1999 to 2002, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, and the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of California-Irvine. Highlights of her academic research include integrated nanomaterials, microfluidics, and bioreactors to control stem cell fates for tissue engineering and liquid biopsy for cancer diagnostics and precision medicine. Dr. Chang received her BS from
The vast majority of cancer drugs fail. Not only is the cancer drug discovery and development process time and money consuming, the success rate is estimated to be less than 5%, largely due to the difficulty and complexity to carry out clinical trials for cancer treatment. Preclinical drug screenings are often carried out through PDXs or PDOs, which are useful models but remain unapplicable to larger studies. Clinical trials, on the other hand, are almost always performed in late-stage patients without a control group, causing fundamental problems in drug development. Yet, 3D culture has emerged in recent years as excellent in-vitro drug selection models. To ensure its quite deployment to cancer drug development, there are some prerequisites that should be met. First of all, the patient sample needs to be readily available. In addition to the tissue, the ability to extract information from the specimen derived from the non-invasive sources such as the core needle biopsy, the liquid biopsy such as urine and blood are perhaps even more important. Therefore, in hopes to accelerate drug discovery and development, Acrocyte dedicates its resource to work on all human specimens, via the in vitro culture, to expand and purify the tumor content, in order to lead to clinically actional study, including multiomic analysis from genomics, proteomics to phenotypics, and ultimately drug screenings and tests.