Brendan Jones, Ph.D.

I provide strategic guidance to sophisticated biotechnology clients on all stages of the patent process.

Dr. Brendan Jones is a registered US patent attorney in Foley Hoag’s Intellectual Property group. He practices intellectual property law with a focus on the life science industry by representing clients in patent prosecution and litigation matters and post-grant proceedings.

Dr. Jones manages the worldwide prosecution of extensive patent portfolios for a diverse array of clients, including large and small biotechnology companies and academic institutions. Over the course of his more than 10 years with Foley Hoag, he has successfully obtained U.S. and foreign patents for his clients covering a wide range of technologies, including protein, antibody, siRNA and small molecule therapeutics, drug discovery platforms, genetically modified organisms, molecular diagnostic platforms, and downstream pharmaceutical processing systems. Dr. Jones prides himself on working closely with his clients to help them implement an optimized intellectual property strategy closely aligned with their institution’s strategic goals.

Dr. Jones also represents both patent challengers and patent owners in post-grant proceedings, including Inter Partes Review (IPR) and reexamination proceedings, and federal court patent litigation, in both the pharmaceutical and biotechnology space. He has extensive experience applying his technical expertise to the representation of clients in patent litigation proceedings in fields ranging from small molecule drugs, antibody- and protein-based therapeutic platforms, siRNA technology, molecular diagnostics, and antibody-based research reagents.

Dr. Jones obtained his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Professor Jianzhu Chen. In Dr. Chen’s laboratory, Dr. Jones studied T cell activation and cytokine expression. Following completion of his doctoral studies, he worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the epigenetics group at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research.

Related Industries

Life Sciences

Related Practices

Education

Suffolk University Law School, J.D., summa cum laude, 2013
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Ph.D., Biology, 2006
Tufts University, B.S., Biochemistry, cum laude, 1999

Bar and Court Admissions

BAR ADMISSIONS

Massachusetts
U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (Agency)

COURT ADMISSIONS

U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit

Experience

Provided IP due diligence counsel to Novartis AG (NYSE: NVS), a global healthcare company, on its $1.4 billion acquisition of Tourmaline Bio, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing pacibekitug, an anti-IL-6 monoclonal antibody, as a treatment option for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD).
Representing Geneocopy, successfully invalidated all asserted claims of two patents that Exact Sciences, the manufacturer of Cologuard, had asserted against Geneoscopy's FDA-approved colorectal screening test in a parallel district court litigation. (IPR2024-00459 and IPR2024-01330)
Represented Ginkgo Bioworks (NYSE: DNA), the leading horizontal platform for cell programming, in its acquisition of StrideBio’s adeno-associated virus (AAV) capsid discovery and engineering platform assets
Represented Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in patent inventorship dispute Bristol-Myers Squibb and Ono Pharmaceutical in federal court. Successfully obtained a favorable judgment adding a Dana Farber scientist as an inventor to six patents directed to cancer immunotherapy using antibodies that block the PD-1/PD-L1 pathway.
Represented EpiCypher in a patent infringement litigation against Active Motif. Successfully obtained a favorable claim construction ruling that resulted in an early dismissal of all infringement claims by Active Motif.
Represented Elysium Health in a patent infringement litigation in federal court. Successfully invalidated claims directed to a nutraceutical composition for being directed to unpatentable subject matter.
Represented Bioverativ Therapeutics in two inter partes review challenges of their patent directed to the use of long-lasting Factor IX products filed by competitor CSL Behring. Successfully challenged CSL’s petition, resulting in the PTAB denying institution. (IPR2018-01313 and IPR2018-01345)
Representing Elysium Health, successfully invalidated pharmaceutical composition claims of a Dartmouth patent for being inherently anticipated by 80-year-old publications reporting the use of Milk to treat the vitamin deficiency disease Pellagra (IPR2017-01795)
Represented Becton Dickinson in a patent infringement suit brought by Gen-Probe involving methods of automating nucleic acid diagnostic assays. Obtained favorable settlement just before trial.
Represented University of Massachusetts (UMass) in a litigation against Max Planck Institute and Alnylam Pharmaceuticals in a dispute concerning the prosecution of a series of patent applications related to the discovery of siRNA. Obtained global settlement agreement by which UMass became co-owner of Max Planck’s competing patent applications on RNA interference.
Prepared and filed patent applications directed to novel therapeutics that inhibit COVID-19 virus infection and reduce the inflammatory response that is the cause of much of COVID-19’s lethality.

Other Publications

Brendan Jones, Hui Su, Audesh Bhat, Hong Lei, Jeffrey Bajko, Sarah Hevi, Gretchen A. Baltus, Shilpa Kadam, Huili Zhai, Reginald Valdez, Susana Gonzalo, Yi Zhang, En Li and Taiping Chen, The Histone H3K79 Methyltransferase Dot1L Is Essential for Mammalian Development and Heterochromatin Structure, Plos Genetics 4(9) (2008) (Published online ahead of print)
Jones, B. and Chen J., Inhibition of IFN-gamma transcription by site-specific methylation during T helper cell development, Embo Journal 25(11):2443-52 (2006)
Kojima, H., Jones, B., Chen, J., Cascalho, M., and Sitkovski, M.V., Hypoxia-inducible factor 1alpha-deficient chimeric mice as a model to study abnormal B lymphocyte development and autoimmunity, Methods in Enzymology 381:218-29 (2004)
Ge, Q., Bai, A., Jones B., Eisen, H.N., and Chen, J., Competition for self-peptide-MHC complexes and cytokines between naive and memory CD8+ T cells expressing the same or different T cell receptors, PNAS 101(9):3041-6 (2004)