BloodScan CEO Eric Lin Joins Former President Tsai Ing-wen on a Silicon Valley Panel on Building Companies Across Taiwan and the US

During her visit to the San Francisco Bay Area, former Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen met with young Taiwanese working and building companies in Silicon Valley at a panel held on October 9 at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in San Francisco. Eric Lin, co-founder and CEO of BloodScan Biotech, was invited as a panelist and, together with four other representatives from startups and the investment community, shared his experience of building a company across Taiwan and Silicon Valley.

Combining the strengths of both: R&D in the US, manufacturing in Taiwan, and the US market

Lin explained that BloodScan's core technology comes from more than ten years of his research at the University of Michigan. After the company was formally spun out in 2023, it moved into Taiwan's National Biotechnology Research Park, whose infrastructure he described as among the best he has seen anywhere. Biotech companies face longer development cycles and higher risk than most startups, and the park gave the team early access to equipment that even a Series A round might not cover. That allowed the team to complete the product within two years, and last month the company completed a system installation in South Korea.

He also noted that the clinical collaborations BloodScan has with multiple hospitals in Taiwan would be very difficult and expensive to assemble in the US, and called this one of Taiwan's most valuable assets. BloodScan carries out early engineering and manufacturing in Taiwan at roughly one tenth of the cost of US production, while the US remains its target market. “Technology developed in Taiwan needs a larger market to scale.”

President Tsai: medical research, like building a company, means coming back from failure

Drawing on her own political career, President Tsai encouraged the founders in the room. She said that building a company inevitably involves many failures, that “medical research and development also fails much of the time,” and that after each failure you come back again until one day you get through. She also spoke about the role Taiwan's health system and National Health Insurance played during the pandemic, and about the manufacturing capability Taiwan showed by setting up mask production lines within weeks: “If you can design it, it can be made.”

In her opening remarks, President Tsai expressed the hope that the experience, resources and opportunities built up in Silicon Valley can be reconnected with Taiwan's startups, industries and the next generation.

Helping cancer treatment

BloodScan analyzes circulating tumor cells from a blood draw to help pharmaceutical companies and patients learn earlier whether a cancer treatment is working. Lin said BloodScan will continue to combine US research with Taiwan's manufacturing and clinical resources, so that more cancer patients can learn from a single blood draw, earlier, whether their treatment is working, and adjust course in time.