Ying Chih CHANG

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
National Taiwan University and PhD from Stanford University in Chemical Engineering.

Scientific Awards:
Future Tech Breakthrough Award, Taiwan. 2017.
MedTech Breakthrough Award, USA. 2018.
Finalist, Beyond Biomed Accelerator, Academia Sinica, AstraZeneca and Amazon, Taiwan. 2020.
17th National Innovation Award in the Academic Research Category, Taiwan. 2020. FDA breakthrough device designation for pre-cancer and cancer detection in the accomplishment. USA. 2021
Excelsior Award, National Innovation Award, Taiwan. 2021

Speech title & Synopsis

1 Cell, 2 Weeks, 3D Culture to Find a Drug:  
Single Cell 3D Culture Technology Accelerating Precision Medicine

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. 
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