Introducing Desiree Lim, a key player on the Discovery Protein Sciences team at Amgen BC. Watch below as she shares her journey from co-op student to senior scientist. Get inspired by her passion for creating innovative therapeutics to help address serious diseases, and her commitment to giving back to the local life sciences community in British Columbia.
My name is Desiree Lim and I'm a Senior Scientist for Amgen BC. I'm part of the Discovery Protein Science Team. Together, we create novel therapeutics that help address serious diseases with unmet needs. I design and clone DNA. This DNA is used to genetically modify cells that make molecules that funnel into the therapeutic pipeline. We discover therapeutics for oncology, for inflammation and metabolic diseases.
Amgen BC has contributed to seven therapies, and I'm very excited because we're using a lot of machine learning and AI to design molecules. We see how it works in the wet lab and see if that's working. We're also looking for new therapies that have never been made in the industry. Amgen BC is the center of excellence for antibody discovery.
I collaborate closely with the team here in Burnaby, my team in San Francisco, colleagues in Thousand Oaks, internationally with India, China, and Germany. I graduated from Simon Fraser University with a major in biochemistry. Simon Fraser is a local university in British Columbia. My Amgen journey started as a co-op student in ImmGenics.
ImmGenics was a company that eventually gave rise to what we now know as Amgen BC. Being at the company for almost 24 years. I've seen the company grow from a small startup company to what is known as one of the major contributors to the BC Life Sciences community.
I've seen how a drug molecule starts from the lab and makes its way to the clinic. And it is gratifying because we can make beautiful molecules that could impact patients lives. Our site is a major contributor to the scientific community here. We go to middle schools to show kids how to extract DNA from strawberries. We go to job fairs to guide people in their career paths.
We go to science fairs to judge experiments. One of the things that Amgen, BC has done recently is to partner up with Science World on their program, called The Future Science Leaders. Future Science Leaders is an after school program for grade 10 to 12 kids that want to go into the STEM field.
So we recently hosted 40 kids on site. It is a bit crazy, but we did get the kids to do experiments in the actual lab bench and some of them got inspired to go into the STEM field to be scientists like us. I started as a co-op student and I had a mentor.
And because of that, I am in the life sciences field. I would like to give back to the community the way that I had my mentor do that for me. This is one way that I thought I could contribute to the future scientists in the community.