Fu-Kuen Lin

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

Life

Lin graduated from National Taiwan University, where he was a Bachelor of Science degree in 1967 and eventually graduated in 1964 with a Master of Science in the Department of Plant Physiology. In the same year he went to the USA to David Gottlieb, a pioneer of fungal physiology and antibiotics research from the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, and earned his PhD there in 1971. Afterwards he initially returned to Taiwan, where he among other things, as a research assistant at the botanical Institute of Academia Sinica and worked as an associate professor at National Taiwan University.

In 1981, Lin employee in a research group at Amgen, which deals with the possibilities of producing a recombinant human erythropoietin ( rhEPO ) and addressed its use in the treatment of anemia. As a leader of this group in 1984 he finally succeeded in deciphering the associated gene (U.S. Patent 4,703,008 ) and a year later the expression of a pharmacologically active recombinant erythropoietin in hamster ovary cells of the Chinese stripe ( Cricetulus griseus ), called a CHO cell line. In clinical studies in phases I and II was demonstrated in 1986 at the University of Washington in Seattle that treatment of anemia with recombinant erythropoietin in cancer and kidney patients, with fewer side effects than treatment with blood transfusions. 1989 Amgen finally received approval by the Food and Drug Administration for marketing the rekombintanten Erythropoetinpräparats Epogen.

As director of the department of biomedical sciences at Amgen Lin was involved in the sequence of the development of new pharmaceuticals and molecular biological studies on their mode of action. 1998 different Fu - Kuen Lin as a pensioner at Amgen.