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LifeX, 218 Oakland Ave, Second Floor, Pittsburgh, PA 15213
WIB-Pittsburgh, LifeX, & Jones Day: Considerations for the Development and Licensing of Patent Portfolios
Please join us for a morning panel discussion and breakfast networking event and discover the commonly encountered issues in protecting developing intellectual property. This program will address aspects to consider when developing an IP portfolio, including public disclosures, patent filings, patentability assessments, competitive landscape analyses, licensing, and critical aspects reviewed by investors and potential acquirers.
Program
8:30 a.m. – 9:00 a.m. Registration and Continental Breakfast/Coffee
9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. Panel
Speaker Bios
Cindy Chepanoske, Director of Technology Licensing at Carnegie Mellon University
Cindy is the Director of Technology Licensing at the Center for Technology Transfer and Enterprise Creation (CTTEC) at Carnegie Mellon University, supporting an agile team of licensing managers who develop and maintain Carnegie Mellon’s vast and diverse IP portfolio. Cindy also helps connect the faculty, staff, and students who are commercializing early-stage technologies from their research at CMU with Carnegie Mellon’s startup community partners, Pittsburgh’s economic development partners, and the investment community to enrich Carnegie Mellon’s efforts toward entrepreneurship.
Jennifer Chheda, PhD, Partner, Intellectual Property at Jones Day
Jennifer Chheda’s practice includes procuring and enforcing patents relating to biologics and small molecules, such as gene therapy, RNA therapeutics, antibodies, antibody-drug conjugates, cell-based therapies (e.g., CAR-T cells), vaccines, and enzyme replacement therapy. She has developed, implemented, and managed worldwide patent portfolios covering commercial biologics and pharmaceuticals. Jennifer’s experience includes patentability, invalidity, noninfringement, freedom-to-operate, and inventorship analyses, as well as conducting due diligence for potential investors, acquirers, and licensees, such as venture capital firms, biotechnology companies, and pharmaceutical companies.
Anna Li, CEO/Co-founder of Korion Health
Anna Li is an MD-PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University with clinical and research focuses on emergency medicine and computational biology, respectively, and a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow. She is the queer, Chinese American daughter of immigrants and is well versed in barriers to healthcare access, both practical and psychological. She strives to use her engineering background combined with her learnings as a medical student to solve inefficiencies and misaligned incentives in healthcare, and her PhD with Vaughn Cooper centers on using experimental evolution to develop customized bacteriophage therapies for patients with antibiotic-resistant infections. In her free time, she is the CEO/Co-founder of Korion Health, which builds an affordable electronic stethoscope and guided interface to enable people to get DIY heart and lung sound screenings from home and has raised nearly $2M to date. Through her work with Korion, Anna was named first place in the UpPrize Social Innovation Challenge for Racial Equity, the first place winner of the American Heart Association’s EmPOWERED to Serve Business Accelerator, first place for the Johns Hopkins Healthcare Design Innovation Challenge, and later invited back as the keynote speaker in 2024, a double first-place winner for the Pitt Challenge Healthcare Hackathon in both 2020 and 2021 as well as the keynote speaker in 2022, and have done a successful crowdfunding raise through Honeycomb Credit, and have completed an MVP and two formative usability studies, among other adventures. Most recently, the team returned from London with international acclaim, having won the $1M Hult Prize Global Finals. Her dog, Winston, also won second place for “Best Walk” in the Lawrenceville Row House Cinema Dog Show and is a therapy dog at UPMC.
Amy Rupert, PhD, Patent Agent, Intellectual Property at Jones Day, Moderator
Amy is a registered patent agent focusing on patent prosecution in the chemistry and life sciences industries. Her practice includes drafting and prosecuting patent applications, diligence evaluations, as well as performing patentability, invalidity, and freedom-to-operate analyses. Amy has a wide range of technical experience that encompasses chemistry, biochemistry, analytical chemistry, bioanalytical engineering, neurochemistry, pharmaceuticals, biologics, analytical methods, oil/gas process and refining, materials/plastics, and assorted mechanical inventions (e.g., building materials, recycling, oil/gas drilling). Amy holds a PhD in chemistry. Her thesis work focused on developing techniques and tools for sampling the extracellular space of living hippocampal brain tissue to study the degradation of neuroprotective neurochemical peptides as a response to oxidative stress. Following her thesis and prior to starting her IP career in 2014, Amy was a postdoctoral research associate at the Pittsburgh Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases (PIND), working on research related to Parkinson's disease.
Alexandre Wibaux, Partner, Corporate at Jones Day
Alexandre Wibaux's practice includes all fields of private equity (venture capital, growth equity, and buyouts), M&A, and capital markets. Alexandre represents emerging growth companies in the US and France, as well as the private equity and industrial investors that finance them, particularly technology, internet-related, and life science companies, at every stage of development from their incorporation until their sale or IPO and beyond. Alexandre is admitted to practice law in Paris and New York and is an alumnus of Cornell University, the University of Paris II-Panthéon Assas, and the University of Oxford.
Pricing Information
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Maximum Capacity
50
Co-Hosts
WIB-Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh@WomenInBio.org
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