Overview
Dean Phelps has over 20 years of experience developing new technologies in GlaxoSmithKline and Takeda Pharmaceuticals, in-house patent prosecution and litigation experience, and nearly seven years of patent experience in private law firms, including patenting of new therapeutic agents and entry into the FDA’s orange book, new compositions (including extraterrestrial) of matter, new methods and analytical instrumentation. He holds a B.Sc. in Chemistry, an MBA in Finance, and a J.D. focused on Intellectual Property Law, providing him with an unmatched background to provide intellectual property counsel to Inventors and large companies. Dean has experience in the drafting and prosecution of patent applications in a large range of technologies including small and large molecules, mechanical and physics fields, with experience in handling patent applications relating to antibody-drug conjugates, oligonucleotides, pharmaceuticals, spectroscopy and microscopy, medical devices, natural and synthetic polymers, polymorphs, new materials, superconductors, magnetics, agri-tech, recycling, and oil & gas technologies. Dean has experience in helping clients manage their patent portfolios worldwide, including navigating new clinical formulations for pharmaceutical patent applications through to licensing and grant in some of the more obscure jurisdictions. His legal experience encompasses numerous technologies such as pre-clinical and clinical formulations, drug delivery, drug discovery, antioxidants, natural products, medical devices, and an unmatched range of analytical methods and instruments.
Dean began his career working on Green chemistry and later moved to GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals, working in vast new technologies applied to drug discovery/development. For example, Dean investigated hydrogen-deuterium exchange in novel exchange positions and novel solvent mixtures as conditions for ab initio predictions (with supercomputer predictions) of optical rotatory dispersion (ORD) and vibrational circular dichroism (VCD) to challenge mistakes in competitors’ patents. Dean investigated deuterium exchange for improving accuracy of solution state polymorphism predictions, or conformational distributions in the solution and gas-phase for ORD, VCD, and UV-Vis absorbance predictions. Dean was recruited by Takeda Pharmaceuticals during an investigation of VCD for quantitative techniques in the FDA’s regulated (i.e., the GMP) environment. At Takeda, Dean worked on global patent portfolios with filings in over 20 countries in collaboration with chemistry manufacturing and control (CMC) teams both in-house and outsourced.
Credentials
- North Carolina Central University School of Law, (J.D, cum laude)
- North Carolina State University, (MBA in Finance)
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, (B.Sc., with distinction, Chemistry)
- Massachusetts
- U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
