Skip to main content Skip to navigation

Chia-Hui’s Three Minute Thesis


From Pasta to Boba

Prostate cancer causes more than 350,000 deaths worldwide each year. Because androgen is essential to prostate cancer growth, inhibition of the androgen signaling pathway has been the major therapeutic strategy to treat prostate cancer for decades.  While most patients can be cured at the early stages, some patients experience disease recurrence after androgen deprivation therapy and radical prostatectomy. Antiandrogens are drugs targeting androgen receptors (AR) to further inhibit androgen signaling. Enzalutamide, one of the antiandrogens currently in clinical use, effectively blocks AR signaling by preventing androgen binding to AR. However, patients inevitably develop resistance, and the disease progresses into an incurable lethal stage. My research aims to understand how prostate cancer develops resistance against Enzalutamide. Decades have passed but our knowledge of prostate cancer has yet to yield a new effective treatment against this prevalent disease. I believe that through understanding how prostate cancer adapts to antiandrogen, we can improve current therapeutic interventions and hopefully find innovative solutions against prostate cancer or even cancer in general.

[Slide will appear here after event.]

Chia-Hui is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Pharmaceutical Sciences and Molecular Medicine program working with Dr. Boyang (Jason) Wu on the WSU Spokane campus. She received her Bachelor of Science from National Yang-Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan and her Master in Neurobiology from Duke University, Durham, NC, USA. Her love for truth and nature persuaded her to pursue a Ph.D. degree and joined WSU in 2020. Sustained by tea and music, she endeavors to be aware of the world and make it a better place. In her free time, Chia-Hui enjoys cooking, gaming, singing, and traveling.