Dean Phelps

Dean Phelps has over 20 years of R&D experience in large pharmaceutical firms including in-house patent prosecution experience, and over four years of experience in private law firms, primarily in the life science, analytical instrumentation and chemical industry. He holds a B.Sc. in Chemistry, an MBA in Finance, and a J.D. in Common Law, providing him with a very strong background to provide intellectual property counsel to life science companies. Dean has experience in the drafting and prosecution of patent applications in a range of chemical fields and electromechanical fields, with particular 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 and the oil & gas technology. Dean also has experience in helping clients manage their patent portfolios worldwide, including navigating pharmaceutical patent applications through to 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 a wide range of analytical methods and instruments.

Dean began his career at GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals, working in new technologies applied to drug discovery. Dean investigated hydrogen-deuterium exchange in novel exchange positions and novel solvent mixtures as conditions for ab initio predictions of optical rotatory dispersion (ORD) and vibrational circular dichroism (VCD) to identify new pharmaceuticals. 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 (GMP) environment. At Takeda, Dean worked on global patent portfolios with filings in over 20 countries in collaboration with chemistry manufacturing and control teams.