Siegmund "Sige" Y. Gutman

Before he was invited to join the board of trustees for UC Santa Cruz, Siegmund Y. Gutman delivered a commencement speech at the same college he attended as an undergraduate student, emphasizing a nonlinear path to a successful career.

“That was probably one of the most satisfying moments of my life,” he said, “just being with so many different students with so many different interests, and being able to encourage and motivate them, and inject them with optimism based on my own experience and the path that I took, and what an unusual, circuitous route I took to where I ended up.”

While pursuing a graduate degree at UC Berkeley in molecular and cell biology and biophysical chemistry, Gutman worked on the Human Genome Project and on research for HIV therapies, but he also became interested in graduate student rights regarding intellectual property.

After attending law school at the University of Illinois, Gutman continued to draw upon his scientific expertise in a career spanning more than 25 years of litigating drug patent cases, working with large teams of attorneys and sophisticated pharmaceutical clients and prominent life sciences companies.

“They tend to be complex cases that require a lot of strategic thinking in terms of how to choreograph the dance of the case, how to bring people together in an integrated way in order to advance a unified strategy,” he said.

He particularly enjoys leveraging his technological background regarding biologic drugs, as he currently represents Amgen Inc. in a Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act (BPCIA) patent infringement action brought by Janssen Biotech, Inc., related to Amgen’s biosimilar drug that would compete with Stelara.

Gutman also led the Proskauer team that represented Sanofi, ultimately invalidating a key Pfizer patent related to pneumococcal vaccines, which represents a market worth billions of dollars annually. Attempting to regain the patent, Pfizer has appealed to the Federal Circuit.

“The courts are trying to decide, as Congress is trying to decide, what is the proper balance between rewarding someone for innovation and granting them a patent, and providing a mechanism that takes into account the public interest for other types of competitive products,” he said, “and that can be a very sensitive balance to strike. … It’s just a soup of interesting issues, and I don’t think that I could have asked to have a career in a more interesting area.”

—Kathryn Stelmach Artuso