Foley announced that Antoinette Konski, partner and the firm’s Silicon Valley IP office chairperson, has been named one of Daily Journal’s 2011 Top 25 IP Portfolio Managers in California. This inaugural recognition honors 25 attorneys who have made extraordinary achievements in the field of intellectual property.
Konski has extensive experience managing IP portfolios encompassing a wide range of technologies, including personalized medicine, regenerative and stem cell biology, antibodies, immunology, gene therapy, nanotechnology, diagnostics, small molecules and drug delivery. She has served as sole lead counsel with life science clients at the highest professional and technical levels, including having represented Nobel laureates Dr. Richard Axel (Nobel Prize, Physiology / Medicine, 2004) and Alan Heeger (Nobel Prize, Chemistry, 2000).
Her many accomplishments include successfully building a large patent portfolio for the University of Southern California (USC) in the area of personalized medicine. This achievement is even more significant when considering the current increased difficulty of securing patent protection for personalized medicine, as a result of USPTO procedures and the U.S. Supreme Court’s Bilski decision.
Additionally, Konski serves as strategic intellectual property counsel to ULURU Inc., a specialty pharmaceutical company focused on the development of wound management products. She secured accelerated examination and approval of a patent related to technology already in the market for the company’s nanoparticle aggregate wound care technology. As strategic counsel to Access Pharmaceuticals, another emerging biopharmaceutical company, Konski obtained intellectual property to protect MuGard™, the company’s FDA-approved composition to treat oral mucositis, a debilitating side effect of radiation treatment and chemotherapy.
She gives back to the community by providing pro bono support as outside IP counsel to the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), whose mission is to accelerate the development of new therapies for chronic disease by funding stem cell research programs throughout California. Konski has organized and co-authored a database for all issued U.S. patents related to regenerative medicine, and facilitated its availability on the CIRM Web site.
We congratulate Antoinette Konski on the honor of being named one of Daily Journal’s 2011 Top 25 IP Portfolio Managers in California.
