[2] After Tanox's tripartite partnership with Genentech and Novartis was made in 1996, Chang returned to his alma mater, the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan and served as the Dean (1996–1999) of the College of Life Sciences.
[3] Chang was appointed by the Taiwanese government as President of the Development Center for Biotechnology (DCB) in 2000, and served as a Science and Technology Advisor of the Executive Yuan from 2002 to 2006.
Chang's mother, Yeh Ting-mei (葉丁妹), was an elementary school teacher, who worked as a housewife after marriage to raise five children.
Afterwards, Chang received a four-year fellowship at Harvard University, where he did thesis research on protein degradation in the muscle during fasting with Alfred L.
[8] IgE plays a central role in the initiation of hypersensitivity reactions in the human body, and is responsible for allergic diseases that affect 20–40% of the population in developed countries.
Among these anti-IgE drugs are: Omalizumab (Xolair), approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of allergic asthma and chronic spontaneous urticaria (primarily an autoimmune disease); Talizumab (TNX-901), shown to be effective in treating allergic rhinitis (hay fever) and peanut allergy; and Ligelizumab, a high-affinity TNX-901 under active clinical development at Novartis.
[10][11][12][13] In 1993, Chang's patent was granted for his discovery of CεmX, a unique region on human membrane-bound IgE (mIgE), leading to another therapeutic approach to treating IgE-mediated diseases.
[20] A few years later, legal disputes arose as the Changs discovered that Genentech launched its own anti-IgE program, developing what now became known as Omalizumab (Xolair).
The two companies and Novartis agreed to jointly develop Xolair, under the reasoning that Genentech had better manufacturing processes to produce antibodies in large quantities.