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.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
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