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Fang Xie, Ph.D.

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Listed in IAM Strategy 300 – The World’s Leading IP Strategists, Fang Xie, Ph.D. focuses her practice on establishing, defending, licensing, sharing and monetizing intellectual property rights for life sciences companies. She has broad experience in worldwide patent portfolio development, intellectual property due diligence, licensing and technology transfer, patentability and product clearance studies, validity/invalidity analyses, patent infringement evaluations, as well as intellectual property litigation and pre-litigation counseling.

Fang’s primary technical areas include biotechnology, synthetic biology and pharmaceuticals, with a focus on immunotherapy, antibody and biologics/biosimilars, nucleic acid synthesis, gene editing, protein and organism engineering, stem cell technology, biomarkers, diagnostics, small molecule drugs, regenerative medicine, analytical chemistry and cosmetics.

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Idea TreeConsider Provisional Patent Filings

Filing a provisional patent application in the U.S. is often a useful strategy for start-up tech companies. A provisional patent application allows a company to preserve an earlier filing date at a minimal expense and delays a much more significant expenditure associated with a non-provisional application by one year. By the anniversary of the provisional application filing, a non-provisional application must be filed in order to take benefit of the provisional filing date. A provisional application is especially useful if it provides a detailed description of the invention and preferably explains valuable alternative implementations. Otherwise any new subject matter added to the non-provisional application will not be given the benefit of the provisional application filing date.

Options for Non-Provisional Patent Filings

With the enactment of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA) in 2011, there are now multiple opportunities to speed up the patenting process for which companies, such as those focusing on nanotechnology related inventions, can take advantage when filing a non-provisional. The two main options are (1) prioritized examination and (2) accelerated examination.


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