image: Speakers and participants gather for a group photo at the 2026 International Conference on Advanced Biomedical Sciences (ICABS 2026), held Nov. 7–8 at China Medical University’s Shuinan Campus in Taichung, Taiwan.
Credit: China Medical University
TAICHUNG, Taiwan, Nov. 9, 2026 — Researchers working on personalized cancer vaccines, T-cell therapy and treatment resistance met at China Medical University (CMU) on Nov. 7–8 for the 2026 International Conference on Advanced Biomedical Sciences (ICABS 2026). The two-day meeting, held on CMU’s Shuinan Campus, featured 13 invited talks across four scientific sessions and a Meet the Editors forum. Speakers included U.S. National Academy of Sciences members Robert Schreiber and Philip Greenberg, academicians of Academia Sinica, and investigators from Japan, the United States and Taiwan.
Topics ranged from neoantigen-based vaccines and immune cell metabolism to resistance mechanisms in ovarian, breast and lung cancers, as well as the muscle-wasting syndrome that often accompanies pancreatic cancer.
The conference was chaired by Mien-Chie Hung, an academician of Academia Sinica and former president of CMU, who launched ICABS in 2021. Hung opened the meeting by thanking CMU Board Chairman Chang-Hai Tsai and President Ann-Shyn Chiang for their support.
Helping the immune system find tumors and keep fighting
The opening session on cancer immunology and immunometabolism brought together three groups approaching immunotherapy from different directions.
Robert Schreiber, the Andrew M. and Jane M. Bursky Distinguished Professor of Pathology and Immunology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, discussed neoantigens, the protein changes produced by mutations unique to each patient’s tumor, as targets for personalized therapeutic cancer vaccines.
Sidonia Fagarasan, professor and vice director of the Center for Cancer Immunotherapy and Immunobiology at Kyoto University and team director at the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences, described how metabolic regulatory pathways shape the strength of the body’s anti-tumor response.
Philip Greenberg, head of the Program in Immunology at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and professor of medicine and immunology at the University of Washington, addressed a persistent obstacle for engineered T-cell therapies: keeping T cells functional inside the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment.
From signaling networks to cancer cachexia
In the first cancer biology and translational research session, Hung examined how ribonucleases interact with receptor tyrosine kinases and what those interactions mean for immunotherapy.
Min Li, George Lynn Cross Research Professor of Medicine, Surgery and Cell Biology at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center and editor-in-chief of Cancer Letters, spoke on pancreatic cancer cachexia, a syndrome of progressive muscle and weight loss that undermines patients’ strength and tolerance for treatment. He called for rethinking its underlying biology as a route to preserving patients’ physical function.
Ruey-Hwa Chen, an Academia Sinica academician and distinguished research fellow at its Institute of Biological Chemistry, presented work targeting the purinosome, a multi-enzyme complex that builds purines, as a potential way to make tumors more sensitive to chemotherapy and more visible to the immune system.
Why tumors stop responding to treatment
Drug resistance was the focus of the T-Star progress reports session, which featured investigators from the T-Star Center, a cancer research program supported by Taiwan’s National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) to advance frontier cancer research through collaboration among the country’s leading institutions. Researchers from Taiwan’s National Health Research Institutes (NHRI), CMU and National Taiwan University (NTU) presented findings on how cancer cells adapt to escape therapy.
Two NHRI investigators traced resistance to changes in cancer cell metabolism. Alan Yueh-Luen Lee, deputy director of NHRI’s Department of Research Planning and Development and an investigator at its National Institute of Cancer Research, described how mitochondrial reactive oxygen species signaling helps cancer cells withstand chemotherapy by adjusting their redox balance and lipid metabolism. Cheng-Chin Kuo, director of NHRI’s Institute of Cellular and System Medicine, reported on paclitaxel resistance in ovarian cancer, describing how α-ketoglutarate produced by the enzyme IDH1 may promote resistance through histone demethylation and activation of AKT signaling, a link between metabolism and gene regulation.
Lu-Hai Wang, an Academia Sinica academician and chair professor at CMU who leads a research team at the university’s Chinese Medicine Research Center, presented an antibody-based strategy against EDIL3, a protein carried by exosomes that drives integrin–VEGFR2 signaling in triple-negative breast cancer. Because this subtype lacks the hormone and HER2 receptors that most targeted drugs act on, patients have fewer treatment options, and new targets are urgently needed.
James Chih-Hsin Yang, executive vice president of NTU, closed the session with a look at EGFR-mutant non-small cell lung cancer, examining how tumor evolution and the surrounding immune environment interact over the course of treatment. Understanding that interplay may help clinicians choose better options once first-line targeted therapy stops working.
Matching treatments to tumor vulnerabilities
The second translational session focused on precision approaches. Hsing-Chen Tsai, associate professor at NTU, deputy director of the Center for Frontier Medicine at NTU Hospital and an attending physician there, showed how epigenetic remodeling can reshape T-cell metabolism to improve immunotherapy.
Wei-Chien Huang, director of CMU’s Cancer Biology and Precision Therapeutics Center, presented LincRNA-p21-derived oligonucleotides designed to exploit a DDB2-dependent DNA repair weakness in aggressive breast cancer. Tai-Lung Cha, director of NHRI’s National Institute of Cancer Research, outlined biomarker-guided selection of tumors likely to respond to dual PI3K–mTOR inhibition, an approach aimed at achieving more benefit with lower drug exposure.
Journal editors meet early-career researchers
A Meet the Editors forum featured Priscilla N. Kelly, senior editor at Science, and Min Li of Cancer Letters, who discussed originality, peer review and how to communicate findings clearly. The program also included short oral talks by early-career researchers, a poster session and outstanding abstract awards.
About China Medical University
Founded in 1958, China Medical University (CMU) is a research-oriented university in Taichung, Taiwan. Its research priorities include cancer, neuroscience, precision medicine, artificial intelligence in healthcare, drug discovery, regenerative medicine, and Chinese medicine and natural products.
Conference information
2026 International Conference on Advanced Biomedical Sciences (ICABS 2026)
Nov. 7–8, 2026 | Shuinan Campus, China Medical University, Taichung, Taiwan
https://spotlights.cmu.edu.tw/icabs2026/
Subject of Research
Not applicable