Universities, capital, locale keys to biotech – Regions can surmount barriers if basic research is strong, Amgen co-founder and Missoula Native Leroy Hood says

Dr. Leroy Hood, a scientist who knows a thing or two about the biotechnology business—he’s had a hand in the creation of a string of successful biotech companies, including Amgen Inc., a $5.5 billion-a-year industry leader—says a city or region must have three main ingredients to build a biotech industry.

By Addy Hatch Spokane Journal of Business

First, there must be a university that does basic research, since “a lot of the ideas of biotech have to come straight out of academia,” the Seattle-based Hood said in a telephone interview last week.

Second, there needs to be a lot of capital available, whether that’s from venture capitalists, angel investors, banks, or a combination of the three. “Generally, it’s most effective if some of those (financial) people are in the community and are committed to building the community,” he says.

Third, the city or region has to be an attractive place to live, because much of the management expertise for such companies will have to be recruited from elsewhere.

Does Spokane have what it takes?

Hood, a native of Missoula, Mont., says he doesn’t know. “I’m not at all familiar with your area,” he says.

That will be remedied to some extent in September, when Hood visits Spokane to deliver the keynote speech at the Spokane Regional Chamber of Commerce’s annual meeting. While he’s here, chamber officials are hoping to introduce him to leaders of Spokane’s nascent biotech industry.

The chamber views Hood’s visit here as a coup, since he’s one of the biotech industry’s most august personalities.

Hood developed the technology that made possible the landmark human genome project, an effort to map the sequence of human DNA that was completed amid tremendous fanfare. He was recruited to Seattle in 1992 from the California Institute of Technology, a move sparked by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates’ $12 million gift to the University of Washington to establish a department of molecular biotechnology.

Hood left that position in 2000 to found the Institute for Systems Biology, a Seattle nonprofit research foundation that uses biology, medicine, technology, and computational science to focus on human biology as a whole rather than on individual cells, genes, or proteins.

While he can’t speak to Spokane’s strengths specifically, Hood says any region that wants to build a biotech economy—and many do, because biotech is a clean industry and its employees generally are well paid—had better look to its universities first.

“Fostering the growth of strong science in academic centers—that is No. 1” when it comes to building a biotech industry, Hood says.

“It is hard to put a new company that isn’t intellectually connected to some academic center in a place and have it go by itself,” he says.

In Spokane’s case, he says a biotech industry here likely would mirror Washington State University’s research expertise in animal science and plant and molecular biology.

“What’s important is to build around your strengths,” he says.

In areas where Spokane is lacking, “think about what you would like your strengths to be and start moving to change them,” Hood suggests. Work on enhancing Spokane’s national reputation to attract dollars and talented people, he says.

Spokane, like Seattle, is hampered by the fact that Washington state has an anti-business reputation and that other states can woo industries with tax incentives and loans—economic-development weapons that aren’t available in Washington due to constitutional limits here on the use of public funds to attract private enterprises.

Still, those and other hurdles can be overcome, Hood says.

“In many ways Seattle is a pretty unattractive place for new startups” because of a lack of lab space and office parks where biotech companies can cluster and grow together, and because of its high cost of living and traffic problems, Hood says. Despite those drawbacks, Seattle’s biotechnology industry is strong because of that city’s “wonderful academic research institutions,” its support for entrepreneurial efforts, and the fact that it’s an attractive place to live, he says.

Hood says that efforts to build a biotech economy should be applauded.

“It’s certainly worthwhile for communities to think about how they can make their community attractive to biotech,” he says.

http://spokanejournal.com/spokane_id=article&sub=1677

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Law firm here helps biotech inventors earn patents

Wells St. John attorneys with science degrees oversee cumbersome process

By Megan Cooley Spokane Journal of Business

Have you heard the one about the lawyer who’s also a scientist? At the Spokane law firm Wells St. John PS, that’s not a joke. It’s reality.

Wells St. John, a specialty law firm here, employs two lawyers with doctoral degrees in biochemistry—David Latwesen, a principal there, and Jennifer Taylor, a senior associate. The two work with inventors in the biotechnology field, helping them to apply for patents to protect a wide range of inventions.

Latwesen and Taylor’s careers allow them to stay on top of their field—of science, that is—while continuously honing their legal skills.

“I was attracted to this because rather than being focused on one project, I got to be on the cutting edge of science all the time,” Taylor says. “It seemed like a fast-paced job that I’d never get tired of. It turns out that that’s true.”

Citing proprietary concerns, the lawyers decline to talk in specifics about their clients’ inventions. They say, though, that their clients range from small-time farmers with new varieties of fruits to scientists who’ve discovered new DNA sequences to large companies that have developed new drugs or laboratory equipment.

All told, Wells St. John has 12 lawyers, each with a doctorate in a field other than law. In fact, to practice patent law, attorneys must be either an engineer or a scientist, Latwesen says. Because much of the firm’s work focuses on protecting mechanical inventions, most of its lawyers have doctorates in engineering, while others have degrees in chemistry, Latwesen says.

About 90 percent of the firm’s biotechnology patent work comes from outside of the Spokane area, Latwesen says. Here, its clients include The Heart Institute of Spokane; Eastern Washington University; New Jersey-based Honeywell International Inc.’s operation here, and other operations in other parts of the country; Micron Technology Inc., of Boise; plus the Richland, Wash., offices of the Ohio-based Battelle Memorial Institute.

About 95 percent of Latwesen and Taylor’s clients are companies rather than independent inventors, Latwesen says.

It costs an inventor about $8,000 to $15,000 in attorney’s fees to have a biotechnology-related patent application filed, which is a more expensive range than the cost when an invention is mechanical in nature, he says. Such billings are probably typical for most law firms, including Wells St. John, Latwesen says.

“The inventions tend to be relatively complex and difficult to describe to the patent office, as compared to mechanical cases,” he says.

The applicant also must pay $500 to $1,500 in government fees during the application process, Latwesen says.

The process

The patent-application process takes about three years to get through.

The lawyers’ first steps in the process involve determining what is new and “not obvious” about an invention. “Not obvious” means the invention can’t be something that someone with the same general expertise as the inventor could have created with minimal effort. For example, an inventor can’t expect to receive a patent simply for changing the color of a product or for making a few insignificant changes.

There must be “some link to making this product better than it was before,” Latwesen says.

Once the exclusivity and value of an invention is determined, the lawyers complete the patent application.

“It’s more like writing a research paper than filling out a form,” Latwesen says. “We’re writing a full explanation of how it works.”

In exchange for that information, the government grants the inventor—if the patent is approved—20 years of full exclusive rights to that invention.

Latwesen and Taylor each work on two to five new patent applications a month, and manage 15 to 20 pending patent applications.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office usually takes about a year and a half to respond to an application. After that, the lawyers’ use their negotiating skills as they play a give-and-take game with the federal agency over the level of protection that it will give an invention.

Taylor says clients are often unaware that if they make the details of their invention public, either through a newspaper or professional journal article or other means, they have only one year to apply for a patent before their invention is considered general information and ineligible for a patent.

Taylor, who earned her Ph.D. in biochemistry at Washington State University and her law degree at the University of Idaho, says the arduous and time-consuming patent process doesn’t usually deter inventors, because the thrill of their discovery fuels them.

“I love seeing the look on their faces when they’re talking about their inventions, especially when you see the look they get when they think of something new right when you’re talking to them,” she says.

Latwesen, who earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry at Oregon State University and his law degree at Gonzaga University, says finding lawyers with expertise such as his and Taylor’s was rare 10 years ago, but the biotechnology-patent law combination has become more common.

“It’s one of those niches that’s starting to open up,” he says. “People are seeing that there’s a need for it,” so they’re specializing in those areas and filling those positions.

Latwesen expects to see a growing need for lawyers, including patent lawyers, who have biotechnology expertise, “particularly with the rapid pace of medical and agricultural advances.”

Biotechnology-related businesses could flourish here, he contends, if the tax structure and economic factors—such as incentives, the cost of the workforce, the cost of industrial space, and other factors—were more comparable with what some other cities offer. The Spokane area’s climate, recreational opportunities, uncongested traffic flow, and the presence of universities and research institutions here could be “a significant draw to persons involved in the start-up of new biotechnology-related businesses,” he says.

Latwesen adds, though, “The relative mobility of starting biotechnology business means that owners of the businesses can compare Spokane to numerous other locations across the country in choosing destinations for their businesses.”

In addition to work in patent law, Wells St. John also offers legal services in the copyright and trademark branches of law. All of the firm’s attorneys are registered before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, qualifying them to practice in any of the three areas, Latwesen says. While several of Wells St. John’s attorneys handle significant amounts of copyright and trademark work, in addition to patent work, Latwesen and Taylor work primarily in the area of patent law “due to the high demand for our services in this area at the present time,” Latwesen says.

Trademarks are brand names for products or services that businesses register with either the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office or their states’ secretary of state’s offices. Wells St. John’s attorneys can investigate for clients whether a trademark is being used somewhere in the U.S. and complete the trademark application process with clients.

Copyrights protect the rights of authors and artists’ work, such as writings, photographs, plays, videos, and computer software. To help enforce a copyright, an author or artist can have his or her work registered with the Library of Congress. Wells St. John’s attorneys help clients protect their rights to their work.

The firm’s roots go back to 1920, when a patent agent named Herbert Smith started an office in Spokane, Latwesen says. The office became a law firm in the 1945, when Greek Wells, a lawyer and Idaho native, joined the staff. The name St. John was added to the firm’s letterhead when Richard St. John became a partner in 1959. Other names were added during the last 44 years, but the firm recently went back to simply Wells St. John.

http://spokanejournal.com/spokane_id=article&sub=1679