Kenneth E. Jenkins

Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo PC

San Diego

Patent prosecution

Jenkins isn't just able to talk to scientists. He is one.

He holds a Ph.D. in chemistry and biochemistry from the University of Colorado. While there, he studied under Professor Marvin Caruthers, known in some circles of the father of DNA synthesis.

Caruthers also co-founded both Amgen Inc. and Applied Biosystems. Jenkins said he remembers meeting patent attorneys around his university laboratory.

These days, he helps others do what his professor did: take university research and spin it out into successful companies that make money for both their founders and their universities.

"I went to law school specifically with the idea to be a patent prosecutor, to write patent applications," Jenkins said. "It actually went according to plan, strangely enough."

The University of California is one of his biggest clients -- fitting for a guy who got his law degree from UC Hastings College of the Law.

He started working for the system in 2002, his first year in practice, and has since done work involving researchers from campuses including Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Merced, Riverside, San Diego and San Francisco.

"It's difficult to bring a product to market," Jenkins said. "It's got to go through the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] process. It's costly. On the few products that make a significant amount of money, the university will make money on that."

Jenkins is hardly the only attorney at his firm boasting multiple graduate degrees. He often works with fellow member Michael D. Van Loy, who holds a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from UC Berkeley.

Biochemistry is now a huge field with numerous subspecialties. But when he got his undergraduate degree in biochemistry from the University of Texas in the early 1990s, it was a bit less popular.

"I joke I finished first in my class," Jenkins said. "There were two of us. It was a brand new degree."

These days, his clients include numerous biosciences and biopharmaceutical companies, as well as City of Hope National Medical Center -- a National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center in Duarte, north of Los Angeles. He spends much of his time talking to professors and other researchers.

"You really get to see the latest and greatest of what's going on in a lot of areas of research," Jenkins said. "It's pretty cool."

-- Malcolm Maclachlan