UC a three-time winner of OFC awards

University of Cincinnati researcher and educator Chia-Ying “James” Lin was honored Friday, Oct. 11, as the runner-up for the 2019 Ohio Faculty Council (OFC) Technology Commercialization Award.

Lin,  director of the Orthopaedic Research Laboratories in the UC Department of Orthopaedic Surgery and the Mary S. and Joseph S. Stern Jr. Endowed Chair in Musculoskeletal Research, was recognized for his work in developing Amplicore, a biopharmaceutical company specializing in a unique approach for aiding soft skeletal tissue repair. The licensed technology developed by Lin’s company involves a novel pharmaceutical delivery method that has been shown to promote cartilage repair, retard skeletal degenerative diseases and reduce pain and inflammation.

The award went to Ohio State University’s Katrina Cornish for her accomplishments in developing and licensing technology that can extract material from the guayule shrub, which can yield sustainable natural rubber latex products. 

Lin says he is honored to be this year's runner-up.

The Ohio Faculty Council, which represents faculty at all four-year public universities in Ohio, launched its annual Technology Commercialization Award in 2016 to recognize a faculty member in the state university system for exceptional research, discoveries and the translation of those discoveries into marketable products and services. Ohio Department of Higher Education Vice Chancellor Mike Duffey presented the awards.

“We expect that Amplicore will be the first of a series of startups that develop from his unique blend of engineering and medical research,” says Lin’s nominator Geoffrey Pinski, the director of Tech Transfer at UC’s Office of Innovation.

This is the second innovation recognition that Lin has received in 2019. MTF Biologics, the world’s largest tissue bank, named Lin this year’s recipient of the J.R. Neff Award. Named in honor of the late orthopaedic surgeon and researcher, James R. Neff, this award goes to an individual whose work in the orthopaedics field “embodies dedication, perseverance and intense curiosity.”

“While treatments for degenerative joint diseases and soft tissue injury still present unmet needs and perhaps the greatest challenges to the orthopaedic medical practice, our new invention to develop novel injectable therapeutics sheds a hope to provide promising alternatives to treat these disorders,” says Lin. 

Last year the Ohio Faculty Council recognized Jay Lee, a professor in UC’s College of Engineering and Applied Science, with the Technology Commercialization Award for Lee’s contribution to the field of industrial artificial intelligence. The year prior the recognition went to UC College of Engineering and Applied Science professor Jason Heikenfeld, for developing a suite of new sensor technology in his Novel Devices Lab.Replace with your text