Dr. Tsai (M.D., Ph.D.) is a rigorously trained physician-scientist focusing on basic and translational research in cancer.

He specializes in tumor epigenetics, tissue architecture, therapeutic resistance and cancer stemness, with a career goal aiming at targeting and treating metastasis and treatment resistance, the two major reasons for cancer mortality.

Dr. Tsai graduated with a MD in 1993 from Taipei Medical University, Taiwan, and completed his clinical training and was board certified in internal medicine, gastroenterology and GI oncology. Dr. Tsai earned his PhD in 2005 in Genetics and Complex Diseases from Harvard University, USA.

During his PhD work Dr. Tsai established novel three-dimensional coculture models to interrogate stromal-epithelial interactions. In 2007, he joined Valerie M. Weaver’s Laboratory at UCSF to study a novel epigenetic mechanism in cancer drug resistance. Following his postdoc research Dr. Tsai funded the Laboratories for Tumor Aggressiveness and Stemness (The TAS Lab) and rose to the Associate Investigator at National Institute of Cancer Research in National Health Research Institutes, Taiwan.

He has published first or corresponding author papers in top-notch journals such as Gastroenterology, JACC, Gut, and JEM. His major scientific achievements include the identification of a novel regulator for Wnt signaling and cancer stem cells, ASPM, and a master regulator of de novo treatment resistance in most cancers, N-CoR2. Dr. Tsai’s breakthrough findings along these lines of research have yielded a number of issued or pending global patents and he is now actively collaborating with academic and industrial sectors worldwide aiming at developing novel cancer therapeutics.