Fatih Mercan is a patent attorney with over a decade of experience in advising clients, ranging from multinational corporations to startups, on a broad range of technologies to align their intellectual property (IP) strategy with their business goals. He is based in the New York office where he is a member of the Chemical, Biotechnology & Pharmaceutical Practice.

In addition to drafting and prosecuting patent applications, Dr. Mercan assists his clients in patent portfolio management, freedom-to-operate, patent invalidity, non-infringement, IP due diligence analyses and Patent Term Extension (PTE) and related regulatory matters. Fatih has deep familiarity with patent law issues specific to life sciences-based technologies, including biochemistry, cell signaling, diagnostics, therapeutics, genetics, immunology, microbiome, and nucleic acids.

Prior to joining Foley, Fatih served as a patent agent at a boutique intellectual property firm in New York, where he drafted and prosecuted patent applications, evaluated the patentability of innovations, conducted prior art database searches for patentability and freedom-to-operate analyses, and analyzed patent and scientific papers and documents.

Before pursuing his legal career, Fatih spent several years working as a postdoctoral fellow at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) conducting research on cancer epigenetics, specifically related to prostate cancer and leukemia. While at CSHL, Fatih also interned within the lab’s Office of Technology Transfer. Before CSHL, Fatih conducted doctoral research on cell signaling at Yale University, aiming to understand how normal cells sense and respond to nutrients.