Dr. Chen was awarded Lifetime Achievement Award

TFRD Director Chen Yuan-tsong was awarded Lifetime Achievement Award by Association of Chinses Geneticists in America (ACGA)

"I like doing research and hope to help the patients who need it most," said Chen Yuan-tsong. Doing research is Chen's lifelong career. He intently wanted to unlock the mystery of the disease-causing gene, and successfully developed a life-saving antidote for rare diseases (RD) patients in the long run. He really deserves all the credit.

Being both a physician and a scientist, Chen, TFRD Director, has devoted himself to defective gene decoding for 30 years. As an academician of Academia Sinica of Taiwan, he made extraordinary achievement in both medical and academic research fields. He won the Presidential Science Prize last year and the Lifetime Achievement Award from ACGA this year.

Chen’s most talked about achievement is that he spent a full 15 years successfully coming up with the antidote Myozyme for newborns with terminal illness, Pompe Disease. His antidote was approved to be marketed all over the world, saving countless RD children. "Not a thousand times, but more than a hundred times," said Chen when recalling the number of failures in the process of developing the antidote.

In 2001, at the invitation of the former President of the Academia Sinica Li Yuan-tseh, Chen returned to Taiwan from the U.S. to serve as the dean of the Institute of Biomedicine of Academia Sinica. Step by step, he built Taiwan into a center for genetic medicine research, dedicating to discovering all the human genes. He believes that it will be possible to find out the connection between genes and diseases, which will make more contributions to disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment. Today, even though he has retired, Chen is still concerned about the development of precision medicine and preventive medicine in Taiwan. He anticipates that the future treatment is about "dealing with the gene instead of the symptoms." Looking back at Chen’s research career, from genetics to genomics and to precision medicine, it can be said that it is a period of struggling years to fight for human health.

Translator: David Lee (Becker Muscular Dystrophy)