UC Faculty Awards 2020: Chia-Ying "James" Lin

College of Medicine awardee honored with Emerging Entrepreneurial Achievement Award

Chia-Ying “James” Lin brings a civil engineering perspective to his work in the areas of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine in the UC Department of Orthopaedic Surgery. After graduating from college in Taiwan and working as a civil engineer for a period of time, he became disinterested with the prospect of moving from project site to project site. That is when Lin turned his creative nature to the architecture and engineering of the human body.

Dating back to his first days of working with orthopaedic surgeons who used body cement in rebuilding joints, Lin realized he shared a lot of the same language with them. Through the process of what is now 15 iterations of artificial knee joints, he incorporated input from surgeons and fellow engineers in the area of tribology, or the friction of metals. This led to working with biocompatible materials called “scaffolds” that can be molded into anatomic shapes to grow and engineer tissue to be transplanted back into the body.

Chia-Ying James Lin, UCâ  s 2020 winner of the Emerging Entrepreneurial Achievement Award.

Dr. Chia-Ying "James" Lin at the Amplicore headquarters in Mason, Ohio. Photo/Colleen Kelley/UC Creative + Brand

Lin has developed a number of platform technologies including 3D biofabrication/printing to augment tissue repairs. Working with Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, Lin’s group invented a “smart” surgical patch with materials that can change shape and then revert back to an earlier shape (shape memory). This allows the patch to be coiled for easier and quicker insertion during surgery, before it morphs back into the intended shape for the cap on the tiny spine. Over time, the patch dissolves and is replaced by tissue, making corrective surgery unnecessary. The way Lin sees it, it is more productive on many levels long-term to develop ways for the body to heal itself than to conduct repeated surgeries.

Lin also developed an injectable formulation that is specifically for aiding soft skeletal tissue repair. The technology has been translated into a commercialized process, with the creation of a biopharmaceutical company, Amplicore Inc. With the licensed technology, Amplicore has developed a pipeline of products with a novel pharmaceutical delivery method that has been shown to promote cartilage repair, retard skeletal degenerative diseases and reduce pain and inflammation.

One aspect of this work that appeals to Lin’s hands-on nature as an engineer is the tangible results he sees. As a basic scientist, he understands the satisfaction of getting research published in a scientific journal. Working in his field as a biomechanical engineer, he gets to take ideas from design to execution, much like an architect or engineer does working on the design of a bridge or piece of infrastructure. It’s what he describes as an unexpected journey from building bridges to building body parts.  

Featured image at top: Chia-Ying "James" Lin is the recipient of the Emerging Entrepreneurial Achievement award. Photo/Colleen Kelley/UC Creative Services

UC Faculty Awards

UC is saluting the 16 winners of our 2020 All-University Faculty Awards in a three-part series in UC News weekly through April 22. Beginning April 23, all winners will also be showcased on the Faculty Awards website.

Related Stories

1

UC and GE partner to introduce high schoolers to engineering

September 21, 2023

Rising 9th and 10th graders experienced a free, weeklong, immersive engineering camp at the University of Cincinnati as part of GE's Next Engineers program. Students completed hands-on engineering design challenges while being mentored by GE Aerospace volunteers, industry professionals and current College of Engineering and Applied Science (CEAS) students.

2

Know Stroke Podcast: UC expert discusses past, present and...

September 21, 2023

The University of Cincinnati's Joseph Broderick, MD, recently joined the Know Stroke Podcast to discuss the current state of stroke research, including the FASTEST trial he is leading to test a potential treatment for strokes caused by ruptured blood vessels in the brain.

Debug Query for this