Keiichi Itakura

is an organic chemist and a Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the Beckman Research Institute at City of Hope National Medical Center.

Biography Itakura was born in Tokyo, Japan on February 18, 1942. He obtained a PhD in Organic Chemistry at Tokyo Pharmaceutical College in 1970. He then accepted a fellowship with Saran A. Narang at the Division of Biological Sciences, National Research Council of Canada, to work on DNA synthesis.

Itakura and others succeeded in synthesizing a plasmid containing chemically synthesized lac operator in 1976, using a technique they called "linker technology".

In 1977, Itakura successfully synthesized the gene for somatostatin. This was the first demonstration of a foreign gene inserted into E. coli.

By 1978 Herbert Boyer's biotechnology startup Genentech had contracted with Riggs and Itakura, As their principal organic chemist, Keiichi Itakura was essential to the success of Genentech's development of synthetic insulin. His work on recombinant DNA technology has had a significant impact in molecular biology and biochemistry. Itakura became director of City of Hope's genetics laboratory in 1989.