Pizza Nights and Medical School: Dr. Ethan Shen's Brave Pursuit of a Dream
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
From Taipei to Wall Street. Where you start is not where you end.
For many, college is a time of youth and freedom — joining clubs, making memories, and enjoying campus life. But for Dr. Ethan Shen, Chairman and CEO of YD Bio Ltd, university was something else entirely: a defining chapter, full of challenges that would ultimately change the course of his life. In 1995, he was accepted into Taipei Medical University, one of Taiwan's most prestigious medical institutions. It was his first step into the world of biomedical science — and the beginning of a journey that would eventually take him onto the international stage.
While most of his peers were caught up in extracurriculars and carefree college experiences, Dr. Shen carried a very different kind of weight. By day, he sat in lectures studying anatomy and pharmacology. By night, he put on a uniform and worked shifts at a pizza shop — not for pocket money, but to bring one pizza home each day and help ease his family's financial burden. What might have looked like an ordinary part-time job was, in truth, a quiet act of commitment: a young medical student shouldering responsibility for the people he loved.
On top of his studies and late-night shifts, Dr. Shen also worked part-time at the outpatient department of National Taiwan University Hospital — the pinnacle of medical practice in Taiwan. There, he watched the country's finest physicians pour themselves into their patients' care. But something else caught his eye: the pharmaceutical sales representatives in the lobby were taking home far more than the clinicians working tirelessly beside them. "That was the moment I understood," he recalls. "Medicine isn't just a profession or a clinical practice. It's an industry — one that's deeply intertwined with capital."
That realization set him apart from his peers. From that point on, studying medicine was no longer simply about becoming a doctor. It was about understanding how industry and capital shape healthcare — and how that knowledge could be used to drive medical innovation. That insight would later become the very foundation on which he built his company and entered the global capital markets.
Even with his days consumed by coursework and his evenings by work, Dr. Shen found a way to keep his inner world alive. He would tuck himself into a corner of the library and lose himself in the wuxia novels of Jin Yong and works of science fiction. Those stories gave him courage and fed his imagination — reminding him that even in the middle of hardship, life could still break free from its constraints and become something extraordinary.
Years later, when Dr. Shen led YD Bio Ltd to a successful listing on Nasdaq, he found himself thinking back to those formative years: the constant back-and-forth between classrooms, a restaurant, and hospital corridors. It was an exhausting season of life — but it was precisely those pressures that forged the vision and audacity he carries today. "Knowledge can change your fate," he says, "but only the courage to dream can truly make it different." From a medical student in Taipei to a leader on Wall Street, his journey is the living proof of those words.
Note: On August 29, 2025, YD Bio Ltd successfully listed on the Nasdaq Global Market. The company's common shares and warrants trade under the ticker symbols "YDES" and "YDESW," respectively.
About YD Bio Limited
YD Bio Ltd is a U.S.-anchored public biotechnology company building an integrated healthcare platform across regulated diagnostics, clinical services, and commercial healthcare markets. The Company operates DNA methylation–based oncology testing programs in the United States under an LDT-first strategy and provides compliant life science distribution and clinical trial supply chain services to pharmaceutical and biotechnology partners. In addition, YD Bio Ltd maintains regulated ocular health commercialization operations and a consumer health distribution platform in Asia. Through strategic partnerships and scalable execution capabilities, the Company advances biomedical innovation with real-world clinical and commercial impact. For more information, visit ir.ydesgroup.com and follow the Company on Facebook, X, Threads, Instagram and LinkedIn.
