Experience and Technical Background
Experienced in the following areas of patent practice:
- Local and foreign patent prosecution
- Patent drafting
- Patentability analysis
- Freedom-to-operate analysis
- IP strategy
- Patent oppositions
- Patent litigation
Primary patent practice areas by technology:
- Immunology
- Molecular biology
- Diagnostics & Therapeutics
- Vaccines
- Cell biology
- Biological methods
Scientific/research background:
A. General technical areas:
- Immunology
- Molecular Biology
- Microbiology
- Cell signalling
- Vaccine development
- Biological assays
B. Honours research:
- Project related to the expression of an antisense RNA of the HIV tat gene to silence gene expression with the potential to inhibit HIV replication during gene therapy.
- Used molecular biology techniques such as PCR and DNA cloning methods to construct a plasmoviral vector expressing cDNA encoding full length tat antisense RNA.
C. PhD research:
- Development of a live attenuated vaccine strain for preventing porcine pleuropneumonia, an often fatal, acute inflammatory respiratory disease in pigs caused by the pathogen Actinobacillus pleuropneumoniae.
- Established proof-of-concept of immunomodulation during vaccination of pigs by expression of bioactive immunotherapeutic peptides from attenuated A. pleuropneumonia vaccine strain.
- Utilised molecular biology, peptide expression and bioassay techniques; and analysed various in vivo immune and disease parameters including serum and lung lavage inflammatory biomarkers, immune cell activation, antibody levels and lung pathology.
D. Postdoctoral research:
- Investigated Fc gamma I and IIb receptor signalling pathways and was part of team that characterised a variant of the inhibitory Fc gamma RIIb receptor associated with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), which was found to be functionally impaired.
- Utilised various cellular biology techniques, FACS analysis, immunoprecipitation and confocal microscopy including via fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET).
