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Taiwanese professor wins rare grant for cancer work

A Taiwanese professor in molecular medicine won a grant from the breast cancer research program of the US Department of Defense, making him the first scientist in East Asia ever to obtain funding of this kind, academic sources said Wednesday.

Chang Nan-shan (張南山) of the Institute of Molecular Medicine at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) Medical College in Tainan City won the grant for his research on zfra, a zinc finger-like peptide that regulates programmed cell deaths, a NCKU news release said.

grant

It is difficult for a foreign scientist living outside the US to gain the Pentagon Breast Cancer Research Program Concept Award, which only five in 1,000 applicants have a chance of winning.

The news release said the number of recipients of Pentagon research funding dropped from 557 around the world in 2000 to 105 last year, and further to 90 this year, because of the decline in US national research budgets.

Chang, who holds a doctoral degree in immunology from the Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, worked at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, the Guthrie Research Institute in Pennsylvania and Upstate Medical University in Syracuse before he was invited in 2006 to lecture at NCKU.

Research

His research has focused on how cancer cells evade immune attacks and prevent induced suicide.

To understand how cancer cells develop resistance to tumor necrosis factor (TNF), Chang’s research group has utilized functional cloning and microarray approaches to isolate genes, which may regulate cancer cell sensitivity to toxic cytokines.

His research group’s discovery of a tumor suppressor WOX1 (also named WWOX or FOR), which enhances TNF function and is apparently involved in embryonic cell differentiation and cancer pathogen, has attracted the attention of cancer researchers from Britain, the US, Sweden, Belgium, Italy and Australia, the NCKU said.
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