Michael J. Wise

Wise is chair of Perkins Coie’s life sciences and health care industry sector. His practice focuses on patent portfolio management and complex contested patent matters in the life sciences industry.

He has 30 years of patent counseling, procurement and litigation experience.

His thirst for a science-based legal career started early amid a group of like-minded honor student friends in Portland, Maine.

“I was fascinated in high school by genetic engineering, and when I learned there were such things as patent attorneys, I wanted to be a biotech patent attorney,” Wise said. He remembers landmark moments, “such as when Genentech went public.”

That was 1980. By 1985, Wise was earning an undergraduate degree in biology at UCLA and by 1989 he was gaining a J.D. cum laude at Loyola Law School.

In 2020, he was named a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, an invitation-only society of lawyers, judges, law faculty and legal scholars. “It’s a great honor,” he said.

Today his clients include vaping technology company Fontem Ventures; City of Hope National Medical Center; genome editing company Editas Medicine Inc.; biopharmaceutical company Eloxx Pharmaceuticals Inc.; Chinese biotech company Shanghai Benemae Pharmaceutical Corp.; New York-based LB Pharmaceuticals Inc.; Ligandal Inc., a regenerative medicine biotechnology company; Nutriomix Inc. and others.

Wise and his team have served as patent counsel for Editas Medicine since 2015. “Now the technology has really advanced from isolating and identifying genes that affect disease to correcting the genes within the cell,” he said.

Editas develops CRISPR gene editing systems for treating ailments such as ocular and blood diseases.

In March 2020, the company partnered with Allergan Inc. to announce the dosing of the first patient in a clinical trial with an experimental CRISPR-based medicine under development for the treatment of Leber congenital amaurosis, a form of inherited blindness.

In August, Editas announced that it had received a Rare Pediatric Disease designation for another CRISPR-based product for treating sickle cell disease.

Over the past year, Wise and his team have drafted and prosecuted numerous patent applications relating to CRISPR editing systems and methods.

They have also been involved in due diligence relating to SEC filings, financing events and partnerships and continuing general patent strategy guidance.

“This is one of the hot, interesting things I’m working on,” Wise said. “We do the patent work and handle the portfolio. We want to make sure to get broad claim scope to protect the client’s ideas.”

In earlier days at Perkins Coie, Wise traveled often to China, where he met Hon Lik, the pharmacist who invented the modern electronic cigarette. That led directly to his current work for Fontem in prosecuting its worldwide e-cigarette patents.

He’s achieved a high success rate in PTAB decisions for the company.

“The dream came true,” Wise said of his career. “I even got to work for Genentech way back. “Now I get to see great stuff in the making.”

— John Roemer