Wake Forest School of Medicine, Department of Cancer Biology
Winston-Salem, North Carolina, United States
My name is Yu-Ting Tsai, and I am now a 3rd year Ph.D. student at Wake Forest University, School of Medicine, in North Carolina, USA. My research interests focus on brain tumors, including breast cancer brain metastasis, and glioblastoma, which are hard to treat due to therapeutic limitations, by studying the role of metabolic reprogramming, mitochondrial dysfunction, innate immunity, and chemoresistance in brain tumors. I finished my bachelor's degree at Taipei Medical University, School of Pharmacy, and gained an understanding of drug mechanisms. My pharmacology background provided a link between current medical and experimental drugs, which helped me study the development of combination therapy in cancer. I also got my master's degree in Medical Science and Molecular Pharmacology at the same college and have three years of experience as research resistant. Before coming to the United States, my research mainly focused on understanding the mechanism of chemoresistant establishment in glioblastoma, targeting the transcription factors Sp1 and Sp4. I also have some experience in traumatic brain injury and neurodegenerative disease. My first-author publications indicate that cancer stem cells, glioblastoma metabolism, and cancer angiogenesis are critical in chemotherapy-resistant development. Once I joined Dr.Soto-Pantoja's lab at Wake Forest, I increased my interest in studying the mitochondrial bioenergetics in tumor microenvironment, focusing on cancer cells and immune populations. By targeting the well-known CD47/SIRPalpha interaction, the "don't eat me" signal, we show that CD47 and SIRPalpha can also facilitate its intracellular signaling that regulates cellular bioenergetics and brain metastasis in the tumor microenvironment. In the future, we will keep focusing on the role of CD47 and SIRPalpha in brain cancer microenvironment.