Che-Mai Chang

Dr. Chang is an Assistant Professor in the Master Program in Clinical Genomics and Proteomics, College of Pharmacy, Taipei Medical University (TMU). He received his BSc in Biotechnology from Kaohsiung Medical University, MSc in Molecular Biotechnology from the University of Birmingham, and PhD in Medical Biotechnology from TMU. During his doctoral training, he developed and optimized next-generation sequencing (NGS)-based adaptive immune receptor repertoire (AIRR) sequencing platforms and applied them to characterize T-cell receptor (TCR) and B-cell receptor (BCR) repertoires across diverse human diseases, including infectious diseases, kidney disorders, autoimmune diseases, and cancers.

After completing his PhD, he served as a postdoctoral researcher at Taipei Medical University-Shuang Ho Hospital, where he continued AIRR research and immune-cell atlas profiling of human kidney diseases. He subsequently joined the Genomics Research Center at Academia Sinica and later the National Health Research Institutes as a postdoctoral researcher, expanding his expertise to long-read sequencing, human pangenome analysis, and complex genomic variation. A representative achievement from this work was the comprehensive characterization of genetic variation and evolutionary divergence in the C-type lectin domain family 18 (CLEC18), using long-read whole-genome and transcriptome sequencing together with pangenome resources to resolve paralog-specific variation and identify a novel CLEC18A segmental duplication.

His current research focuses on immunogenomics and immunopharmacogenomics, aiming to elucidate the mechanisms underlying human disease and the inter-individual variability in responses to drugs and vaccines. His representative studies include AIRR analyses in rheumatoid arthritis (RA), coronavirus disease (COVID-19), primary mucosal melanoma, aldosterone-producing adenoma (APA), and immunoglobulin A nephropathy (IgAN). He aims to develop scalable high-throughput AIRR sequencing platforms and analytical frameworks to discover disease-associated immune biomarkers and signatures for precision diagnostics and therapeutics.