Division of Allergy, Immunology and Rheumatology (AIR), Chung Shan Medical University Hospital, was founded in 1998 by Prof Gregory G.J. Tsay. Our division had become more and more prosperous under Dr. Tsay’s leadership since then, and now Dr. James, Cheng Chung Wei succeeded as the director in 2007. We are committed to serve the patients with the pioneering knowledge of diagnosis and treatment, educate the next generation of physicians, and conduct clinical trials and translational research. We passed the teaching assessment of Taiwan Rheumatology Association and we are qualified to recruit and mentor the specialists of rheumatic diseases.
We aim to provide excellent care for patients with diversity of rheumatic and other immune-mediated diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis (RA), systemic lupus erythematous (SLE), Sjogren’s syndrome, vasculitis, connective tissue diseases, ankylosing spondylitis (AS), various osteoarthritis, and allergy. Our team also experienced with immune-target therapy, including biologics and small molecules therapy and had also engaged in clinical trials. We focus on health care for diseases resulting from mechanism of inflammation and autoimmunity.
The AIR team consists of 2 professors, 1 associate professor, and 6 attending physicians. Owning the largest biobank of AS in Taiwan, we cooperate with many international specialists to gain better understanding of its immunopathogenesis. We also engage in at least 80 global clinical trials of various phases during the past 10 years and have been awarded many honors. We organize a weekly seminar, which is a forum to discuss the recently discovered clinical results and advances in immunology and rheumatology. For researches, we focus on clinical trial, translational research in AS and spondyloarthritis, and also big data researches from the National Health Insurance Database in Taiwan. Until now, we have published more than 120 articles in SCI journals with high impact factor.
In the future, we will integrate disease-related faculties to bring the most benefits to our patients and educate the next generation of experts in diagnosis, treatment, and research of autoimmune diseases. We will also combine the resources from different divisions and develop a powerful software system to collect big data for clinical purposes.