Tamoxifen is a hormone modulator that has been widely used as an anti-cancer agent. Typically, patients with estrogen receptor positive (ER-positive) breast tumors will receive Tamoxifen either as a first line treatment or as a second line treatment after surgery. Despite the benefit of using Tamoxifen as hormonal therapy in treating ER-positive breast cancers has been widely demonstrated in patients at early treatment stages, its effectiveness seems to be significantly reduced in patients after five years post-treatment. Interestingly, two thirds of the tumors that become resistant to Tamoxifen continue to express ER. Thus, it is necessary to develop novel strategies that can be applied to target both ER-positive Tamoxifen-resistant and estrogen-independent breast cancer cells

Investigations on the possibility of using Survivin inhibitors for the treatment of Tamoxifen-resistant or estrogen-independent breast cancers

2011 - NHRI Research Day “Elected paper” award

2010 - American Association for Cancer Research Scholar-in-training award finalist

2010 - The 15 th Taiwan Joint Cancer Conference “Outstanding research poster” award

2010 - NHRI Research Day “Excellent research poster” award

2009 - NHRI Research Day “Elected thesis” award

2009 - The University of Auckland International Doctoral Scholar

1. Cheng SM, Shieh MC, Lin TY and Cheung CHA*(2022); The “Dark Side” of autophagy on the maintenance of genome stability: Does it really exist during excessive activation? Journal of Cellular Physiology 237(1):178-188
2. Cheng SM, Lin TY, Chang YC, Lin IW, Leung E and Cheung CHA* (2021); YM155 and BIRC5 downregulation induce genomic instability via autophagy-mediated ROS production and inhibition in DNA repair; Pharmacological Research 166:105474.
3. Cheung CHA*, Chang YC, Lin TY, Cheng SM, and Leung E (2020). Anti-apoptotic proteins in the autophagic world: an update on functions of XIAP, Survivin, and BRUCE; Journal of Biomedical Science 27:31.
4. Lin TY, Chan HH, Chen SH, Sarvagalla S, Chen PS, Coumar MS, Cheng SM, Chang YC, Lin CH, Leung E, and Cheung CHA* (2020). BIRC5/Survivin is a novel ATG12–ATG5 conjugate interactor and an autophagy-induced DNA damage suppressor in human cancer and mouse embryonic fibroblast cells; Autophagy 16(7):1296-1313
5. Chang YC, Kondapuram SK, Yang TH, Syed SB, Cheng SM, Lin TY, Lin TC, Coumar MS, Chang JY, Leung E and Cheung CHA* (2020); The SMAC mimetic LCL161 is a direct ABCB1/MDR1-ATPase activity modulator and BIRC5/Survivin expression down-regulator in cancer cells; Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology 401:115080
6. Wang CY, Chang YC, Kuo YL, Lee KT, Chen PS, Cheung CHA, Chang CP, Phan NN, Shen MR, and Hsu HP* (2019). Mutation of the PTCH1 gene predicts recurrence of breast cancer; Scientific Reports 9:16359
7. Huang WT, Tsai YH, Chen SH, Kuo CW, Kuo YL, Lee KT, Chen WC, Wu PC, Chuang CY, Cheng SM, Lin C-H, Leung EY, Chang YC, and Cheung CHA* (2017). HDAC2 and HDAC5 up-regulations modulate survivin and miR-125a-5p expressions and promotes hormone therapy resistance in estrogen receptor positive breast cancer cells; Frontiers in Pharmacology 8:902
8. Sarvagalla S, Cheung CHA, Tsai JY, and Coumar MS* (2016). Disruption of protein-protein interaction: Hot Spot detection, structure-based virtual screening and in vitro testing for anti-cancer drug target-survivin; RSC Advances 6:31947-41959