For innovation in all facets of biotechnology, Joseph A. Williams, Jr., Ph.D. helps you secure the intellectual property rights you want, through world-wide patent prosecution and related proceedings. Having been with Marshall, Gerstein & Borun since 1993, Dr. Williams is able to help you get where you want your intellectual property to take you by combining his legal experience with extensive bench experience gained from doctoral training in biochemistry and post-doctoral research in molecular biology and microbiology. Whether you are a start-up protecting your core platform technology, a not-for-profit protecting your technology to shop for licensing, or a company protecting your clinical trial candidate or approved therapeutics, you benefit from his reliable advice and portfolio guidance. Recent Client Work: When a client's efforts to bring a recombinant therapeutic cytokine to the market were abandoned well into clinical trials, the client shifted focus to a peptide mimetic for the cytokine. Dr. Williams worked with the client from the time attention shifted to the mimetic and beyond its FDA approval to develop a patent prosecution strategy that ultimately gave rise to a US and foreign IP portfolio providing protection for the eventually-approved compound, along with compound modifications, formulations and methods of use before the compound hit the market. Product sales are expected to eventually exceed one billion annually. The breadth of claim scope in the portfolio was leveraged to bring potential competitors into negotiations from which the client acquired even broader protection by in-licensing competitors' related technologies. A start-up company working in the area of immunological therapeutics designed and developed an expression vector that provided significantly increased recombinant protein expression and which proved to be useful well beyond the core immunology focus of the company. Dr. Williams drafted and prosecuted the patent application that secured for the company world-wide protection for what became the first commercial product for the start-up. Today, the expression vector technology is licensed to a multitude of entities and is also the cornerstone for a growing in-house contract manufacturing process, the combination providing a revenue stream that is the predominant source of income for the start-up's successor. Dr. Williams worked with a university and its licensors to protect all aspects of a vaccine with over 60 patents around the world and sales easily expected to exceed one billion annually. University scientists had developed the viral vaccine which was shown to be essentially 100% effective in preventing infection giving rise to cervical cancer and was ultimately approved first by the EMEA and then by the FDA. Dr. Williams help build an IP portfolio that protected the vaccine antigen, as well as variations of the antigen, as it worked its way through the approval processes until it hit the market. Representative Experience Dr. Williams has extensive patent prosecution experience in a wide variety of biotechnology disciplines, such as: Recombinant therapeutics Peptide mimetics Vaccine technology Pharmaceutical formulations Nanobiotechnology Antibody technology Diagnostic and therapeutic methods Background and Credentials: Joseph A. Williams, Jr., Ph.D. brings significant experience in the field of biotechnology, having worked as a technical specialist and patent agent before becoming an attorney as well as completing extensive scientific research. He works with clients in a wide variety of biotechnology matters involving domestic and foreign patent prosecution, U.S. interference and foreign opposition proceedings, non-infringement/validity opinions and portfolio management. Dr. Williams graduated from the DePaul University College of Law in 1999. Previously, he graduated from North Carolina State University in 1980 with a B.S. in Chemistry and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 1988 with a Ph.D. in Biochemistry. His graduate research involved study of heterologous regulation of gene expression and isolation of nuclear factors that mediate specific gene expression. Dr. Williams' post-doctoral research at the Louisiana State University in New Orleans focused on cell cycle-dependent regulation of gene expression (1988-1990, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology) and bacterial assays to screen for inhibitors of viral proteases (1990-1992, Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Parasitology).