Lin Fu-Kuen

Lin Fu-Kuen ( Chinese 林福坤 ; * 1941 in Keelung , Taiwan ) is a Taiwanese-American geneticist . As an employee of the Amgen biotech group , he succeeded in deciphering the gene for the hormone erythropoietin .

Life

Lin studied at National Taiwan University , where he graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1964 and a Master of Science degree in Plant Physiology in 1967 . In the same year he went to the USA to David Gottlieb, a pioneer of fungal physiology and antibiotic research from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign , and received his doctorate there in 1971. He then returned to Taiwan, where he worked as a research assistant at the botanical department Institute of the Academia Sinica and worked as an associate professor at the National Taiwan University.

1981, Lin employees in a research group at Amgen, dealing with the possibilities for the production of a recombinant human erythropoietin (rhEPO) and its application in the treatment of anemia dealt. As head of this group, he finally succeeded in decoding the associated gene in 1984 (US Patent 4,703,008) and just one year later the expression of a pharmacologically active recombinant erythropoietin in ovarian cells of the Chinese striped hamster ( Cricetulus griseus ), a so-called CHO cell line . In clinical studies of phases I and II from 1986 onwards at the University of Washington in Seattle it could be shown that the therapy of anemia with recombinant erythropoietin in cancer and kidney patients has significantly fewer side effects than treatments with blood transfusions . In 1989, Amgen finally received Food and Drug Administration approval to market the recombinant erythropoietin preparation Epogen.

As director of the Department of Biomedical Sciences at Amgen, Lin was subsequently involved in the development of new pharmaceuticals and in molecular biology studies of their mode of action. In 1998 Fu-Kuen Lin retired from Amgen.

literature

• Lin F. (1984), DNA sequences encoding erythropoietin. , U.S. Patent 4,703,008.
• Lin F. et al. (1985), Cloning and Expression of the Human Erythropoietin Gene. , Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 82: 7580-7584.

Web links

• Photo of Fu-Kuen Lin and his colleague Chi-Hwei Lin