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Laura O. Spiegelman has a biotechnology and life sciences practice focused on partnering and licensing deals, with particular emphasis on complex, mission-critical transactions relating to biotechnology-to-pharmaceutical-company collaborations and strategic alliances.

She takes a well-rounded, interdisciplinary approach, combining depth in business, science, and the multiple areas of law that find their nexus in biotechnology and life sciences. She has inside general counsel and extensive business development deal experience, has an undergraduate degree in biology (and French), and is a registered patent attorney. She assists clients to structure, negotiate, analyze, and manage strategic and complex partnering, licensing, and business development transactions and relationships. These range from foundational technology licenses, to early-stage research and drug discovery collaborations, to worldwide collaborations to develop and commercialize pharmaceutical products, to acquisitions and alliances surrounding marketed drug and biological products and product pipelines. With start-up clients, leading up to working with them on their partnering deals, she assists them to align and improve their portfolios of in-licensed rights so as to be prepared for partnering.

She gained critical operating experience when she served as Associate General Counsel and the only practicing general counsel at Kosan Biosciences Inc., then a 130-person public biotechnology company with two clinical programs in chemotherapy and multiple earlier-stage programs, for over a year in 2003 and 2004. Having gotten to know the company through a partnering deal with Roche that In Vivo magazine named one of the top 10 biotech deals of 2002, in her time there she helped the company successfully settle litigation that threatened the license for its lead clinical program, pursue active business development programs, complete a $28 million registered direct offering, manage the company’s corporate and academic collaborations, rapidly establish relationships with clinical sites to advance the company’s clinical programs, and implement Sarbanes-Oxley corporate governance and HIPAA initiatives. Her company experience makes her particularly well attuned to the larger business and operational context for transactions and the issues that emerging and public biotechnology companies face.

Prior to Kosan, Laura had a life sciences licensing, partnering, and commercial transactions practice in Palo Alto, California, working primarily with Avigen, Gilead, Rigel, InterMune, Xencor, and Kosan, and with other life sciences companies and investors.

She received her J.D., Order of the Coif, from Stanford Law School, where she focused on areas of law and business most relevant to the biotechnology and life sciences industries (including by way of examples studying food and drug law with a former general counsel of the FDA, patent law with a practicing patent litigator, securities regulation with a former commissioner of the SEC, and legal and business issues surrounding differences in biotechnology transfer in the U.S. and France through a fellowship the law school awarded to her), designed a “molecular biology for lawyers” course, and was a Member Editor for the Stanford Law Review and a founding member of the Stanford Technology Law Review. She received her B.A., cum laude, in biology and French from Amherst College in 1995, where she completed an honors thesis in biology surrounding nuclear membrane dynamics examined in a sea urchin system, and the French department awarded her their Dijon Teaching Fellowship to teach English at the Université de Bourgogne.

While a student, she worked in research laboratories for the San Diego biotechnology companies Canji, Syngene, and Hybritech. The research she participated in at these companies involved a bacterial expression system for a human cancer-related protein, a molecular diagnostic test for tuberculosis, and hybridoma tissue culture-related research.

Laura is a member of our Life Sciences industry group (practicing within the partnering/licensing practice area as part of the Technology Transactions Group). She is also a member of our Venture IP (VIP) group (which focuses on investor-side IP due diligence), providing to investors pragmatic, business-oriented legal advice regarding licensing and partnering portfolios. She is a member of the Licensing Executives Society (LES) and is Board Member/Secretary of the Professional Women’s Healthcare Alliance (a Bay Area industry group for women in biotechnology/medical device industries). She resides in our San Francisco office and visits regularly in Palo Alto. She also works regularly with life sciences colleagues from throughout the firm, including in particular the London, New York, and Tokyo offices.