Protecting Utah's brain trust: the state of the state's IP community.

• Author: Thomson, Kimball
• Position: Intellectual Property - Editorial

BY KIMBALL THOMSON Chris Wight is a strong believer in the value and power of intellectual property; he has seen first hand how a company's success and even survival can depend on a vigorous IP effort. * Early in his legal career, Wight served as director of Intellectual Property of a small, pre-product biopharmaceutical company in Seattle, Washington, called Immunex. "At this early stage, Immunex needed to be quick and aggressive in protecting its key discoveries," he says. * On one occasion, Wight became aware that Immunex's imminent cloning of a novel gene had been leaked to the public. This knowledge prompted him to file a patent application the same day the company's scientists isolated and definitively characterized the gene. Only later did he realize that this application was filed just days prior to a competitor's application, thus securing a dominant intellectual property position for Immunex. "If we'd waited even a few days longer to file the Enbrel patent applications, the company would have lost out," says Wight. * The product protected by this intellectual property? Enbrel, now one of the world's most successful biopharmaceutical products, reaping revenues of nearly $1 billion per year. This IP protection helped result in the 2002 sale of Immunex to Amgen--for $16 billion.

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The lesson? "You have to be aggressive about creating and protecting those rights, and that takes commitment," says Wight, who recently left his position as general counsel for Myriad Genetics to spearhead the biopharmaceutical intellectual property practice at Holland & Hart.

Wight sees intellectual property as the foundation for scientific innovation and economic growth: "Intellectual property protection provides investors with the confidence that when they make an investment, which is often huge in industries such as biotech, the opportunity for a return exists. Without effective IP protection, investment dollars will dry up, and innovation will cease. Investors and employees alike need to know that there is value in the company's intellectual property, and that it is being aggressively protected."

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A Decade of Growth

By any reasonable standard, Utah's intellectual property community has experienced rapid growth during the past decade, particularly in the areas of patent acquisition and litigation. According to Kevin Laurence, a patent attorney with Stoel Rives, a study of Utah legal firms' web sites reveals that the number...