From discovery to market: The role of IP strategy in drug development

Ryan: Welcome and introduce Wendy Hurlburt, the President and CEO of Life Sciences BC. Over to you, Wendy.

Wendy: Thanks, Ryan. Welcome everyone to our webinar on the Role of IP Strategy in Drug Development and thank you for all joining us today. As we begin I would like to acknowledge that I'm joining this event from within the ancestorial traditional and unceded Territory of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the Territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. I'd also like to acknowledge that others are joining us from other traditional and unceded Indigenous Territories across this beautiful Province and country. We're excited to be here today to host this event virtually. Over the past year Life Sciences BC and our community have fortunately embraced virtual events. We're grateful that we can still continue to discuss and draw attention to the extraordinary work being done in the life sciences sector and discuss some of the important issues and policies related to our sector. For those of you who do not know, Life Sciences BC is a not for profit society. Our members consist of academic and research institutions, local and global companies operating in the life sciences space, which we cover as digital health, med tech, med devices and diagnostics and therapeutics and those companies that provide support and services to the broad life sciences ecosystem. We're funded through membership and the generous contributions of our sponsors and partners. This event was made possible by the support of our longstanding sponsor, Gowling. Thank you for your investment in Life Sciences BC and the life sciences ecosystem. Your support is invaluable to all of us. At each event we like to introduce our newest members. Today we would like to welcome Evonik Health care, L9 BioScience and UBC's Academy of Translational Medicine. Welcome to the Life Sciences BC family. We're always welcoming new members so please reach out to any of us at LSBC, or go to our website for information about membership, if you're interested.

So onto the program for today. We're excited about today's event, a very interesting topic. In fact we've had a lot interesting dialogues as we prepped for this session so I think it's going to prove to be quite interesting, and as Ryan said, please add to your questions to the Q&A so that we can make it as interactive as possible. This event will look at the role of IP strategy in drug development. Drug development in Canada is a long and complex process and the market is very competitive. At the heart of drug development is intellectual property. Life science companies develop an IP strategy at the outset of a new product and have a competitive advantage when they do that in a strategic manner by creating value, generating value and obtaining market intelligence. Without this strategy companies risk losing their IP assets or missing out on investment opportunities and/or being exposed to competition. So hopefully you'll gain some great insights today but have a look at your IP strategy as you are developing your innovation.

I'd like to start with introducing our speakers. Brian Kingwell, who will be moderator. Hi, Brian. Brian is a partner in the Vancouver office, practicing in the firm's global IP and life sciences groups. For over 20 years his practice has focused on patent prosecution and strategic patent portfolio counselling in the areas of molecular biology, genomics, biochemistry, chemistry, chemical engineering and medical devices. Brian advises innovative clients across a range of sectors and industries including health care, biotechnology, agriculture and energy. He has a wide range of experience in obtaining patents for innovative products, examples of which include: a novel family heterocyclic antibiotics, the InsectSelect protein expression vector, high oleic acid brassica juncea plants, I'm sorry I should have practices how to say that with you first, Brian, and heavy metal waste remediation processes and the first human gene therapeutic approved in Europe. So thank you, Brian. Again, Brian will be our moderator.

I'll introduce the next two speakers. Isabelle, if you can turn on your camera, Isabelle Riedl from Medicago. Originally from Quebec City, Isabelle received her PhD in medical sciences in 2005 in Stockholm, Sweden. In 2016 she graduated from Stratford University in France with a specialized diploma in intellectual property. Isabelle was then hired by Medicago and has worked for the company in its intellectual property department since then. At Medicago, Isabelle receives the work related to prosecution of patents and trademarks. She's also in charge of different IP related activities such as freedom to operate analysis. Finally, Isabelle is a Canadian Patent Agent trainee.

Then Sonia Ziesche, from Gowling, is joining us. Dr. Sonia Ziesche is a principal Patent Agent and the Chair of the life sciences group of Gowling WLGs Vancouver office. Sonia works with clients in the areas of biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and related sciences to develop patent programs designed to capture innovations and provide a competitive advantage. Sonia provides strategic patent advice to individual entrepreneurs, small and medium sized enterprises as well as multi-national corporations and academic institutions. She helps her clients to implement holistic patent strategies to maximize value of patent portfolios in key markets and specializes in finding practical solutions to the most challenging patent issues that frequently accompany complex biotechnology and pharmaceutical innovations. Something that I think many would agree with that are attending this. Sonia obtained her PhD in biochemistry from UBC and her BSc from the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany.

So now I'd like to call upon Brian to start the panel discussion. Over to your, Brian.

Brian: Thank you very much, Wendy and Ryan and everybody else who is joining us now or join us later on a podcast. This is a wonderful opportunity for me and I hope for everybody else to hear from Sonia and Isabelle who have worked together to deal with the challenges and many opportunities that have come with the pandemic, over the past now more than a year, and indeed before that. The challenges and opportunities that come with growing what is a now vibrant life sciences company within the Canadian context. So thank you both, Isabelle and Sonia, for bringing that perspective to this group. It would be, I think, great to start, Isabelle, with some background on the company itself, on Medicago, the story of Medicago. How it got started and where it's been. Maybe where it's going.

Isabelle: Yeah. I can tell you a little bit about that. Thank you, everybody, for having us today. So maybe some of you know Medicago from it's earlier days. I think it was founded in 1999. It was a spinoff from University Lavelle, here in Quebec City, that grew progressively and through the years we changed. Our platform is plant based for protein expression and in the beginning we were working in an alfalfa plant and it now it moves to tobacco plant, quite quickly, and our main activities were protein production in the plant. Mainly proteins that can be manufactured into vaccines such as influenza vaccines and others as well. Yeah, with the pandemic there were a change of plans like for everybody, so our bio plan got shuffled a little bit and our focus was put on COVID-19 vaccines, which brought us a lot of attention and brought us closer than ever to having a commercial product. It's changed many times in the company and we've grown now over, I think, 500 employees both in Quebec and in the US, where we have a plant, a factory, with the plants and where we make large quantities of vaccines.

Brian: It's fascinating stuff and growing rapidly during a pandemic. I did promise myself that I wouldn't use the growing opportunities for your company too often during this webinar, but it is a fascinating thing that you've been growing, and growing particularly in the vaccine business. If you can give everybody a little bit more insight about what it is that's new about the vaccine platform, what the vaccine platform is, and how it's different from, as far as I can tell, everything else that's come before.

Isabelle: Yeah, that's a good point because the vaccine is an innovation from our standpoint but this is due to the platform that we're using. So the protein, or the antigen that we're making, we produced using plants, using the tobacco plant, and there is no plant based vaccine that is being commercialized in the world and there's very few companies that are doing this, but Medicago's foundation is the use of the plant platform to produce therapeutic proteins, or the like, such as antibodies for example. So what we do, basically, is we used the plant as a bioreactor, or mini factory, so it produces the proteins of interest and then you proceed to extraction of the protein, which you will formulate as a vaccine. Our technology is centered around virus like particles. So these are the proteins that we produce using the plant as virus like particles so it's a shell of a virus of interest. In the case of COVID, it's a shell of that may make the coronavirus up on display on that shell are the S protein. It's the same mechanism that's for influenza. It's a shell. It's devoid of ... material and it exposes human antigen protein on its surface. So that's a little bit where one is unique. There are some real T based vaccines that are being commercialized, such I think, HPV, vaccine against HPVs, real T based and some things like this but there's no plant based vaccine. For us, we're going to put both of those things together.

Brian: With such a novel platform, at least for a patent person like me, the question comes up. So how do you manage the intellectual property that's associated with so many different facets of innovation? You've got the system itself for growing. You've got purification. Multiple levels of potential intellectual property. A lot to manage there and so, Sonia, maybe you can chime in with some general background to set the context for our discussion about strategy. To give people, if you like, a landscape of the landscape, a picture of what an IP strategy might include and the facets of it, for a company like Medicago, obviously all of which need to be thought through.

Sonia: Thank you, Brian. Happy to talk a bit about IP strategy and some of the stuff we're obviously, Isabelle and I, are doing together. A key strategy is a very broad term. Honestly, sometimes I think companies think they don't really need an IP strategy because they don't really think they have a lot of IP, but I think really most organizations have some form of intellectual property that's of some value and therefore need some IP strategy. If you'll look broadly at this, an IP strategy always should have two components. One is you should look obviously inward at your own IP but you can't just ignore other people's IP either. So even if you're not so focused on your own IP you have to be aware of what other companies are doing. So I see it this way, so you really need an inward looking strategy where you look at protecting your own key innovations so that pairs with your own life, your own IP and you also need an outward looking. So you look at other people's IP so you can identify IP that's out there and if there's anything that might be problematic, from a point of you might be in danger of infringe, so this has to be dealt with early on. There's obviously different strategies you can employ. You can licence. You can try to design around or you can try to invalidate but I think all of these strategies should be implemented early on and for it to be implemented right and should be at the get go of IP, when you think about IP, when you get going on your projects that that's the key message I have, I think. If people don't come something out with this, think about your IP strategy. Think about it early and think about those two facets of IP. It's not only about your own. It's also about other people's IP and be aware of it.

Brian: Thanks, Sonia. I think that does emphasize how big the problem can be, in a sense. There are a lot of things that you need to be thinking about in an IP strategy, which is why in a way Medicago makes such a good case history, in the sense that Medicago's had to deal with all of those complicated IP strategy issues but also within the context of all of the challenges that come with success with the new technology. So that managing, I'm hopeful today's discussion will give people a perspective on how it's practical to manage an effective IP strategy, within the context of a company that's facing all of the other usual challenges that come with success. So, Isabelle, you can give people who are listening some sense of how it is that Medicago manages those different things. The business imperatives and the IP strategy and how those things marry.

Isabelle: There are many, many things to consider but if you start with the fact that we were, for a very long time, an R&D company. We were doing lots of development in laboratories that are in a university, in the beginning, and then we moved up with our own facility but still no commercial products. So basically what you do is R&D and you don't have the same strategy, at that point, when you compare to when you're commercial or established or have several products on the market, licencing strategies and things like that. So I think that for an R&D company you must not fall into the trap of not doing anything, like Sonia mentioned in the beginning. Not paying too much attention to IP because, anyway, you're not going out there so you should prepare and I think that's why all IP people are planners. We're all planners. We like to think and plan ahead and that's a good thing because in IP you need to be aware of those things. You need to prepare. You need to have plans and you need to get those plans approved by the management, and the higher management especially. So you need to build something. In the beginning, I think for us, it was a lot of trade secrets. There's a lot of optimization so there's also that aspect cannot be neglected at any stage, basically, but in the beginning that's also very true. Then you start building your platform, building your products of interest. Your portfolio, and as this grows so will grow attention upon you, and you're going to go into press release. You're going to go into research collaborations. So you need to have your stuff protected in a way, or well framed in that context, especially when your forging alliances with others. What's IP needs to be very clear so that you can forge a good alliance and this can be well described in any kind of contractual agreement. So I think that's very, like starting with the beginning, that's how you would do. As you develop your product, as you develop innovation and groundbreaking approaches, then of course you need to protect these because they are going to become, for you, a valuable asset to either to commercialize or to licence. So this grows progressively and as much as you get closer to commercialization then you really need to have a look at what's out there. That's where freedom to operate or other related analysis come into place. It's difficult in the beginning to put that into place because it's complex and you need to specify a lot of parameters. But once you get your package together, then you start doing your first analysis and then you can expand, depending on how your product evolves, how it changes. But you cannot leave any stone unturned but there's a gradation into the amount of work you need to put into this.

Brian: There was an interesting tension in your story about the fact that you need to plan for relatively far into the future.

Isabelle: Yeah.

Brian: IP necessarily is relatively a slow process to acquire and needs long term planning but also the willingness to adapt to new circumstances. To change your strategy, your long term strategy, depending on, for example, whether or not there's a pandemic at the moment. I imagine that there have been periods at Medicago where you did revisit strategy in light of fairly dramatically changing events.

Isabelle: Yeah. We've seen that. We've seen also others doing this because, as you know, patents are getting published after 18 months, after the filing date and you could see different strategies here. You can ask for accelerated publication. You can get your stuff out there faster, and this has been used by some others to put their technology forward so that you could get a patent faster, because in some companies it can represent a leverage tool and a different asset if you want to licence your stuff. Also it's good if it's a patent rather than an application. Or you could want to postpone this. So you will file a traditional priority, PCT, no 18 months and then you're going to want maybe to delay examination as much as possible. It all depends on your technology, how groundbreaking it is and how much you want to share about it. But we've seen both strategies going around here but also elsewhere.

Brian: Let's dive down into that in a little more detail in the context of one part of this strategy is the need to protect your own innovations, and as an arm of an overall strategy how is it, Isabelle, at Medicago approaches protecting your own key innovations and aligning that with innovation within the company?

Isabelle: So with the years that we've been through, the many years we have had and the collaboration we've had in part also with Gowling, ... and Sonia, so we've developed some general strategies but like you said, we had to revisit that at some point, especially with changes in the company, but also changes that we had absolutely no control on like the pandemic. So we have a general strategy in terms of prosecution. We sort of more or less always do the same thing. We work a lot with filing provisional applications as priority application. They have their advantages. Not everybody does that but for us this is a mechanism we use. It works well. Sonia is also familiar with that mechanism. It works fine for us. We use a lot the PCT application following the priority application because it opens a lot of doors and you may want to close them later if you want. It means that you can, after once you go into national phases following your PCT application, which is an international application, then you can decide in which country you want to have your technology become patented. There it depends on a lot of things. It depends on money. It will depend on money because each country costs something. It will depend on where you're going to go and commercialize your product. Depends on where your competition is. So these are things that we weight in at Medicago. Internally we discuss with business development. We discuss with marketing and also with research and innovation to make those decisions.

Brian: I'm curious about the degree to which, given all those shifting interests that you formalize IP policy or inventor education, the kinds of things that go along with an IP strategy and there are, I think, a fairly wide range of ways in which you can make that a more or less formal exercise. Medicago's run the gamut from an early stage research organization to a much larger organization now, which would usually mean a transition from relatively informal approach to things like an IP policy or documentation of secrets or ... education to something more formal.

Isabelle: Yeah, I would say that is actually true. When we were working physically on the location, now I'm at my place and we work remotely, at least for the IP department, but when we were on site it was very easy for me to go and speak to the inventors. To have an in-house person, for IP in a company, that's a value for the interactions with the inventors. I think Sonia may want to add something about this because I'm sure she's also working with companies that don't have IP in-house people. These are probably very different interactions than those that she has with me or our team. That's one thing. So for us it was easy to establish those relationships with the scientists. We have an IT team that's quite stable. We have a science that's quite stable and we're very lucky and happy about this because it allows to build bridges and good communication channels, be them informal or more official. So that communication is being maintained and in my opinion is the foundation to have good patent applications. To have good disclosures in the application. To have solid description examples. That's high value. I'm sure, Sonia, you want to add something about this. About the relationship.

Sonia: Yeah, I can just chime in on, I totally agree with Isabelle. I mean, that's kind of the thing. A patent really ultimately is to serve a business purpose, right? It's not that the patent is a patent is a patent. Quality actually does matter in a patent application. You want a quality application so the appropriate work has to go into it and you have to have the proper communication with the inventors. Yes, I'm very lucky that I'm working at Medicago with Isabelle who kind of brings me talks on her side with her inventors, and brings me already distilled down and cleaned up but even then, even that Isabelle and I, we have weekly meetings that are very important to just know what's going on, even then we often have to go back and go actually to the R&D team and have to hear it directly from them. What's going on? What needs to be done? What needs to be covered? What are the really finer details of the invention? What different angles can we take? What is there? It's kind of sometimes I feel it's a bit like you try to do a mind meld. You know, one of these Vulcan mind melds where you try to get into the researcher's mind to really get all the info and then, of course, we talked about it, IP is such a long game. You try, here and now, to somehow predict the future and put in your patent application what you might need 5 years down the road when you're prosecuting that thing and go like, why didn't I put this sentence in? Right? That would be so useful now. So you try to do this a bit, kind of like saying, okay, what could I need in the future? What could the Patent Office need? What does the examiner might ask for? Then of course the ultimate end game is like if you have a patent, and if you have a technology that's kind of worthwhile, yes you're competitors are getting interested in it. Then your competitors are getting interested in it. First of all, they will look at it. They want to see what information is in there but they also might go out and want to drag you to court. So you have to think about, it's just like a patent agent nightmare like, what if I'm standing in front of a judge or what if the patent is taking about, how solid is what is in there? Will it stand? Is like the data we put in, the claims for drafting, this comes all to the quality of the patent. The file history. You want to have this all clean. You want to have a strategy with this. In terms of claim drafting, people are probably aware, the claims are really the heart of the patent and you can have broad claims, and you can have narrow claims, and usually broad claims are attractive. But they're often more difficult to get and they are also often not so easy to enforce. Narrow claims are generally more specific. They're easier to get and they're usually also easier to enforce. So they both have value so you want to have a good mix of both in your patents but also in your portfolio. You have keystone applications and patents but then you have more specific applications that really run down on your product. So lots of strategizing. Lots of trying to look into the future.

Isabelle: There's also, like you just mentioned, sometimes you have those what we call more like core patents. These have an expiration date. For many companies, you know this, you see those dates coming to a more or less, long time. Then you have to answer the question to yourself but also to higher management, okay, what do we do once this expired? So this comes back to stimulating innovation as well, which is also one of the purpose of patents. So if you still want to have some assets that can be licenced or commercialized, you need to improve your product, because you're not going to get a patent just to get a patent. You need to actually protect something so a lot of our other work is also on improvement. Like for many other companies, you need to get improvement. You need to patent those improvements. You need to get them out there.

Brian: Great discussion that highlights the fact that as you said, Sonia, a patent is not a patent is not a patent. They come in a bunch of flavours, and the flavour you pick needs to be strategic in the sense you that you devote appropriate resources to appropriate kinds of patents, depending on how the innovation fits within the context of your business. The context though for how prophetic you can be, how imaginative, how far you can reach, is often set by a landscape and searching. I'd be interested to hear from both of you, Sonia, maybe you first about the ways in which you can approach searching. Are there patentability or landscape searching in order to give context to that exercise of capturing the full scope of an innovation?

Sonia: Yes, searches are kind of, we're always searching. The searching is the heart of IP in some sense. You have many different searches. Landscaping is one of them. Having an ability search is another one, and freedom to operate is yet another search, and we can probably touch on all of them a bit. Landscape, I see a landscape really as kind of a strategic tool for decision making. So in a landscape search you really want to get a better understanding of the state of technology. So it can be focused on patents but you might want to just know the state of the art. So it's not only patents, it's non-patent literature, it goes hand and hand I think a little bit with market research. It can help you think about and accept. It gives you insight. Who is doing what? Who is doing what? Who are the players? Who owns IP? What IP is active? What has been abandoned? You might see a company that owns a certain thing, and they had a portfolio, and there's all of that. You can actually learn a lot if you look at landscapes, the players in the landscape, the technology and also, if you drill really deeply down, what trends might there be that you don't really kind of obviously, but if a whole patent portfolio is being abandoned you say like, somebody was interested in it but they didn't pursue it. So it really, I think, it's a good strategy tool and can help make decisions in where to go next and how kind of invent and drive your own innovation. Isabelle, we have done landscape, would you kind of agree with this, how you're using landscapes?

Isabelle: I agree. The use of landscape is very useful, as you know, but for us it was very useful in the early stages of product development. I'm not saying we don't do these with the product that is in clinical phase 2 or something like that, but for us the real value of landscapes, we really see it when we're at pre-clinical stages. So R&D development stages. That's when we look a bit more into what's out there. So you look at it with having always two questions in mind. It's like, do we put more time and effort in developing the product? And, the other question which comes into later stages, do we put time and effort into patenting the technology? I've seen landscapes collaborating to the go no go of the product, depending on when such stage it was. Also, often new scientists also an important source of information here because they read a lot of scientific literature, so they are very aware of which group in the world is working on which aspect of the technology they are interested in. So they can feed you a little bit with this as well especially when it comes to an unpatent literature because they are specialists in that. I'm more of the patent person so I will do the searches, but specialize with patent literature, and depending on what I find I might want to complement with the non-patent literature search. Then you put these things together and you look at what people are doing. It's like, are doing the same thing as someone else, then not only it may have no value from a patent point of view, but it may have no value from a business perspective. That's where it joins a little bit marketing and market analysis. So I think this is good to do this in the beginning, and to get a good idea of what others are doing, because it could also trigger, let's have a work around. How can we make the product better? This will lead you to patentability, at some point, anyway. So we've used it in those two circumstances. Deciding on whether or not we're going to file a patent application on this or whether or not, at the earlier stage, is there anything that we can protect here if we go the product and the stage where it is right now. If the answer is no, it might reshuffle the cards of a project development teams and things like that. That we've seen.

Brian: I'm fascinated by your explanation about how doing some of that landscaping, early, can lend to perspective to much of what the company does. To give a direction in its innovation. It is of course a challenge for any busy, early stage enterprise that's innovating to devote resources to that exercise of patent landscaping, patent searching. I'm curious about how, Isabelle, the decisions are made about the resources that you're willing to allocate, both money and time and people. It takes your time. It takes time away from scientists and decisions need to be made about how important that kind of IP landscaping and searching exercise is. I'd be interested to hear what you have to say as lessons for others about how to approach that.

Isabelle: Yeah. Like I said, I try to mobilize a lot of internal resource when I do those things. Like the good relationship that we have with the scientists helps a lot, because it helps you provide direction in the beginning, where to go with your landscape analysis. Then it depends on the company. Maybe even participants here, they have IP departments in their company, I don't know. You can have a small department. You can have big department. For us, we're lucky at Medicago, we have more than 2 in-house people that are really patent people and that will be able to be this bridge between the science and the law and that kind of thing. But still, I need the hands to do the work. It's either me, so I've been participating in those research, of course. Often we go with the firm, like Gowling for example. There are also firms that are not law firms that are service providers in that field. We haven't been there so much because we have this relationship with Gowling, that is interesting, and we also have students. Students that have a background in the life sciences because in order to do a good landscape you need to have a background in life sciences. You need to understand the technology very well. That's very important. Then sometimes we get those students that have life science background but also a little bit of law training, can be like a law student, sometimes we get. That's really good. That's a good activity for them because it really forces them to dive into the patent world and they see a lot of patents. They see claims. They see how people are trying to protect things. In the past we've been doing this. When we're lucky enough to have a student we will put them on that kind of project. It's very good to start with. So it's a little bit of a mix or so. If we're closer to filing a patent then I may want to involve a little bit more patent agents, folks like Sonia and her team. Depends also on how crucial that analysis is related to this. Then of course you have to put this in a format that you can communicate to others, especially people that may be don't know so much about patents. So that we've done in the past. We usually circulate this as either some internal communications but I much prefer to have face to face meetings to explain what we have seen and what are our conclusions. We bring this information and it's part of a package for the project managers. So they will consider our output but they will consider the output from many other people, or departments, at this stage. So you bring in what's your result. You say why it's good, why it's not good, but in the end you're not the one taking the decision.

Brian: That description, Isabelle, lends itself to maybe Sonia commenting on, not just for Medicago but in general, the degree of integration of outside counsel, outside patent people, with the innovation process. The way in which people like yourself, working on drafting patent applications, can be involved with people, the actual innovators, the in-house IP people and how that teamwork between the outside team and the inside team can facilitate cost savings and the way in which that can, or in some cases, cannot work. Your lessons on that.

Sonia: I think you touched on this earlier. Both Isabelle and I, I think communication like with anything, it's really in the heart of things and that being clear what's asked, being clear where we going and being able to directly, I mentioned already Isabelle and I and our team here from Gowling, we have meetings and you might think on one hand, you know that's a big time commitment and it's also added costs, but in the end it's saved so much. I personally think they are so valuable because it just saves so much time in trying to, you know sending emails back and forth, back and forth, when it just sometimes so much easier to just have a chat about something. Things come up and it's an informal way to, you know, we have of course agendas where we talk about ongoing projects and what's burning and what needs to be taken care off, but it's also a good way to just see what's going on, and what doesn't always have to have an email, and things come up during a discussion, and then there's good follow ups through that. That would just not happen. I can't say it in just a purely email form. Before the pandemic happened we have had usually at least once, sometimes twice a year, we have in person meetings and it was a bit ironic because Isabelle and Martin came over to Vancouver to visit us for a work meeting, just the end of February before the pandemic took off. We weren't really obviously very, Medicago already had it's eyes on this, but we were talking about all things but of course not the pandemic yet. We talked about other projects, right? Not even a month later everything changed. It's like what we had discussed in that meeting, end of February, I just had looked at the notes. I just found them. It's like, oh yeah, that's how quick it can go and I remember we were talking about it, kind of casually, like yeah, interesting this new virus and so on. Then 2 weeks later everything was shutdown. Nobody thought it's how it would end. I guess pandemic, in this sense, because we are in Vancouver, Medicago is in Quebec, we are kind of used to talking remotely anyway. So the personal meetings are nice, and an added bonus, and we like to have them for big projects.

Isabelle: We have this regular channel, every week, but we also have those ad hocs and for me the main difference I've seen is the docketing is so much clearer. We're a lot more on time with our deadlines. We can anticipate a lot better. It allows for better planning when people go on vacation, when there's Christmas holidays. It's a great tool. I strongly recommend it.

Sonia: Yeah. That's the thing with cost saving. It's like be on top of things, I guess.

Isabelle: Yeah. You don't have to have it every week. If you're a smaller company you may also have less things to talk about so then you reduce frequencies of those meetings. It's just to figure out something I think that's regular and you prepare for the meeting. We should talk about this, this, this and that, and it will allow to fulfill this deadline. Okay, fine. You go and you have your meeting and you talk about those things, instead of exchanging 15 different emails, for which you are going to be billed anyway. I think the company should consider having this type of channel.

Sonia: I already mentioned it before, Brian, for drafting applications. As I said, I think you just have to have these conversations. Obviously I know a lot about Medicago's technology because I've been involved with it for many, many years now and have drafted, or was involved in drafting, a lot of the applications but obviously I know a lot about it, I'm not the expert.

Isabelle: We get new stuff. Even us from our scientists. You're like, okay, this is different.

Sonia: There is nothing that beats talking and really, I'm calling it grilling, I sometimes joke that one of the main inventors at Medicago, we grill him and we always say, like man, this is every time it's like a PhD defense all over for this poor guy. We're asking all questions. What about this? What about this? What could you do there? He is just always great answering all these questions and that's just nothing that would come out in email, that just has to be this kind of PhD defense project kind of feeling where you really take everything apart and try to really go to the details of it.

Brian: So communication's vital, I'm hearing. There's a good question here from ... ..., is a nice transition. A question about life cycle management. So again, this is part of costs and part of the long term planning of IP, but there are issues associated with portfolio management, showing that you're keeping track of your portfolio, controlling costs and also life cycle management. As you said, Isabelle, the idea that in the life sciences the term product development timelines are very long, and you need to have an IP vision that extends out beyond the expiry of your early IP to the next generation of your IP. I'd be interested, maybe Sonia you can start on ways in which companies can manage portfolios and to deal with the realities of IP life cycles which controlling costs.

Sonia: I guess the first thing that comes to mind for me is I think for companies to, what I would say, practice good patent hygiene. Right? You file your patent application. You get your patent. Woo hoo and then not just forget about it. They need tending because they accumulate costs. It's important, I think, to look frequently through your portfolios, see what you have or where's your portfolio going, where's your product development going, which patents are value still, which are not of value any longer which you might want to abandon. Just you have to just look at your portfolio and look at it and make hard decisions sometimes. There's a big factor for cost management. The other one I would say is I think what I see is that a lot of small things just add up. Just from a patent prosecution. Yes, you're taking an extension here and there, and one extension might make sense in the sense of you needed more time to come up with a strategy, or you needed more data and so you take an extension to react to something from the patent office, which can be very valuable and strategic and you pay some money for it, and it's not even that much. But if you have a big portfolio and that becomes some kind of a habit, and for not a particularly good reason, it's just you keep taking extensions because you don't want to make this decision or you're not keeping track. These costs of taking extension, and it's not only extension, there's a lot of other little things that can really ate up if you have a big portfolio, one you're in the hundreds of patents and this happens on every little of our applications, that really adds up. One cost is not that much. If you have a big portfolio that adds a lot of cost. I think would I say is good hygiene. Make decisions that have to be made even if sometimes you don't feel like it. Just be ruthless looking at your portfolio, evaluating it, cutting down costs. I don't know that kind of answered the question.

Brian: Yeah, I guess we need to hear from Isabelle how you learn to be ruthless. How you institutionalize ruthlessness.

Isabelle: So there's many things that can be considered here. Sonia, you talked a lot about once you have a portfolio how you can manage it and have this good hygiene. Now that we've built a portfolio we do practice those kinds of internal examination of the portfolio and you do ask the question, is this offensive or defensive value for us, in any kind? Is this something we can licence, if not now, later? Maybe yes, maybe no, depending on the technology. Is this something we're using? Is this something someone else could use? So that's a little bit of the questions you need to ask when you look at something that you've developed and protected. But there are other ways also, I think, to save costs, especially for smaller companies or companies that are starting to grow a portfolio. First I think there's been a lot of democratization into docketing systems, to have your in-house docketing system can help. I'm talking about something more than an Excel sheet into which you keep track of your deadlines. So you should look out there. There's a lot of things available for docketing system. There are some that are very simple. Very accessible, cost wise also, but you can build up to a system that is good enough for IP law firms. So there's a range of things available here and there's means to save costs there. You can also save costs by using translation services. Also using service providers for translations, because translations are important when you to start to file in different countries and there's means to also save costs here by using a firm, or service provider, by getting quotes. Always, always ask for quotes. Compare them, compare the services, ask yourself the question, do I need all of those features? If I don't need them then there's no reason why you should pay for them. So don't underestimate doing those kind of screens. Build yourself an Excel sheet with what are your requirements, what are the prospective service providers that could help you out there and use this to make your decisions. That applies to translation services, it applies to docketing systems, it applies to patent search databases as well. We have an internal software that we use; that we're into a contractual agreement with a service provider for these things to search. Of course you can use Google Patents, and you can use Patent lens, that's not a problem. But if you're ready to take it maybe to a higher level, maybe search for sequences also, biological sequences, then it may be good to maybe get something in-house. Again here, there's a lot of possibilities, so you should also ask for information. Ask around like which patent database are you using? What are the pros and cons, and build yourself your Excel sheet and get quotes because you can lower your costs by doing this. Even for us when we end up like a tree, or contract with a service provider, you look around again and you're like, is this service provider giving me what I need? If no, what else do I need and can someone else provide it to me? So there's no resting here. You shouldn't do that and, for example, we've changed our docketing systems through the years. We've changed our patent search providers through the years as well. For me, this has good value. I would say, finally, you can also lower your costs by, I think a PCT is nice because it allows you to open the door to a lot of countries at a later point. Also starting with a provisional US patent application is good because it will be abandoned after 1 year if you don't want to do anything with it. You don't even have to take an active step to do that. Saving some money by doing this, I think, in my opinion. For us for some technologies, we really didn't know in how many countries we would go after 30 months, but once we got there, it was the in the entry of 4 countries or it was 25. So it depends on how your product is going to revolve. You can't take that stand when you file your provisional application. So these are some things that I recommend to you to do, especially if you have a early stage company or the like.

Brian: Thanks very much, Isabelle. I think that brings us essentially to a close. We're at 5 minutes to the top of the hour and I think that means that Wendy gets to wrap up a conversation that runs the risk of going on and on. There are a lot of issues.

Wendy: Yup. Well thank you, Isabelle, Sonia and Brian, for this really informative discussion and the insights. Isabelle, thank you very much for sharing the Medicago story, so to speak, and your journey. It's always great to hear it from the perspective of someone that manages this on a day to day basis. Sonia, your passion for IP, infectious. Living in your world must be a very fun world to every single day, so thank you for sharing your passion. I love your expression, 'practice good patent hygiene'. I think it's something I may reach out to understand a little bit more about that, yet at the same time be ruthless. Lots of great advice and Medicago's very fortunate to have you as a critical partner. Brian, as always, excellent moderation. Thank you very much. This session has provided some great nuggets and advice for people as they go through their patent journey. Finally, a big thank you to Gowling for sponsoring this event. It was very informative and we always enjoy hosting this annual event. Peter has now brought up our upcoming events slide which we always like to share with people as we close off events. So coming up on November 3 and 4 is our sixth annual Invest in BC Conference, presented by Lumira Ventures. Last week we announced the 31 early stage companies that will be pitching. In addition to the pitching companies we have presentations from some of our larger BC companies, Zymeworks, AbCellera, Xenon and a couple of others, Chinook, and panel sessions with active angels in BC, etcetera. So please mark that in your calendars and attend if you can. To date we have over 250 people registered of which 85 of those are international investors. So throughout the 2 days there'll be lots of opportunity for networking on the online platforms, so those of you that are interested in meeting some of those investors, please join us. The tickets are available through our website or you can reach out to any of us who can help direct you. On November 18 we're going to have our McCarthy Speaking series with a focus on oncology and on the 24 we'll be virtually in Kelowna for our Showcase series and then December 2, our Blakes speaking breakfast. So, again, thanks for everybody attending today. Hope to see you at future events. Lastly, we'd like to thank our annual sponsors as we close up, so I think Peter's going to bring that slide up. So thank you to them. Without your support we would not be able to do everything that we do. With that, at 10:59, Pacific Time, I will wrap this up and, again, thank you very much to Gowling and our speakers. It was a great session.