Dr. Kai-Chun Cheng

• Director, Department of Ophthalmology, Kaohsiung Municipal Siaogang Hospital, Kaohsiung, Taiwan

Kai-Chun Cheng, an ophthalmologist, has been in Kaohsiung Municipal Siaogang Hospital since 2006. His current research focuses on using a proteomic approach to study which proteins in the ocular fat tissue of the Graves' orbitopathy (GO) are up-regulation, which proteins are down-regulation, and he found fifteen up-regulated and two down-regulated proteins in GO orbital fat tissues. Up-regulations of the specific proteins in orbital fat tissues from GO are associated with biochemical mechanisms or capacities against endoplasmic reticulum stress, mitochondria dysfunction, cell proliferation as well as apoptosis in GO orbital fat tissues. He also uses immuno-proteomic methods to survey novel autoantigens expressed in the orbit fat tissue of GO patients. He found that ALDH2 might be a putative novel autoantigen in GO. Besides, he found that anti-ALDH2 antibody level showed positive correlation with the clinical activity score thus implied that plasma anti-ALDH2 antibody level might predict the disease activity of GO, suggesting anti-ALDH2 antibody might serve as a new biomarker for GO. Thus measurements of anti-ALDH2 antibody titers allowed assessment of the disease activity of GO. He still tries to find other appropriate biomarkers, so that doctors can use these biomarkers to speculate whether patients with hyperthyroidism will have Graves' orbitopathy in the future and give early preventive treatment , or to monitor the progression of Graves' orbitopathy by changes in the levels of these biomarkers.