Siegmund (Sige) Gutman

Siegmund Gutman's patent law journey began as a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley in the early 1990s, where the lab he worked at was involved in developing new automated DNA sequencing technologies for the Human Genome Project.

"The work we did was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health and other public and private sources," he said. "At that time, many of us graduate students who worked in laboratories that were developing new and useful technologies that were funded by various public and private sources wondered who owned the technologies that we were developing and what were our ownership rights as potential inventors of those technologies. I was among them. My curiosity about patent law continued through graduate school and ultimately led me to go to law school and my decision to become a patent lawyer."

This month, Gutman joined Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Glovsky and Popeo, P.C. after previously working at Proskauer Rose LLP. He joins Mintz as chair of its life sciences litigation practice and co-chair of its patent litigation practice.

Gutman's prior notable work at Proskauer includes victories for clients such as Sanofi Pasteur Inc. and SK Chemicals Co., Ltd. in a Federal Circuit appeal against Pfizer, Inc., where all 45 claims in Pfizer's patent regarding pneumococcal conjugate vaccines were deemed unpatentable. Notably, this success was achieved independently of Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp., who had also won at the PTAB but settled with Pfizer during the appeal.

Gutman also represented Amgen Inc. in a case under the Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act concerning Amgen's biosimilar of Johnson & Johnson's Stelara, a monoclonal antibody drug generating substantial revenue.

"Our success allows Amgen to be the first to market with a biosimilar of Stelara," he said.

Gutman continued: "Both of the cases discussed above were challenging and fascinating because they raise the types of complex issues discussed above that [Dr. Claude Bernasconi, a professor of physical organic chemistry from the University of California at Santa Cruz] helped train me to address almost 40 years ago -- we needed to consider patent law, scientific, FDA regulatory, and business perspectives to develop a plan for success. It's akin to playing 4-D chess."