Angelyn Larkin

Angelyn is a partner in the Intellectual Property practice and a member of the Life Sciences industry team who helps life sciences companies build patent portfolios that support both scientific innovation and business growth. Prior to transitioning to patent law, Angelyn spent many years as a scientist working at the interface of chemistry and biology. Although she counsels companies of all sizes, Angelyn works particularly closely with emerging and growth-stage biotechnology companies as they move from early research and company formation through financing, strategic partnerships, and potential acquisition. Her practice centers on three interconnected areas: patent prosecution, strategic intellectual property counseling, and IP support for corporate transactions.

Angelyn develops layered patent strategies designed to protect innovation as both the science and the business advance. She works with scientific teams to identify inventions, determine where patent protection can provide meaningful commercial value, and build U.S. and international portfolios around core technologies and future developments. Her patent prosecution practice includes preparing and prosecuting U.S. and foreign patent applications across a range of life sciences technologies, with a focus on creating portfolios that can grow with the company and provide robust protection rather than simply targeting a single invention.

This prosecution work is closely connected to Angelyn’s strategic counseling practice. One particular area of focus revolves around supporting life science companies that seek licenses to support their early needs prior to developing new technology and patent rights of their own. As the case law governing the relationship between licensed and later-developed IP continues to evolve, Angelyn helps clients consider how ownership, licensing, and portfolio decisions made early in a company’s life may affect future product development, partnerships, and commercialization. She also advises on patentability, freedom to operate, portfolio development, and intellectual property due diligence, helping management teams make informed decisions about where to invest critical early resources and how to build a portfolio that supports the company’s broader business strategy.

Those decisions have become particularly important in a more selective funding environment. Angelyn works with emerging life sciences companies to identify and protect the innovations that can help differentiate the company and its technology for venture investors, potential partners, and other stakeholders. She also works alongside corporate attorneys when intellectual property is central to a financing or transaction, advising on venture financings, public offerings, acquisitions, strategic collaborations, and related diligence. When a life sciences company’s value is concentrated in its technology and intellectual property, Angelyn helps position the portfolio for the transaction at hand while preserving flexibility for future development, licensing, strategic partnerships, and other commercial opportunities.

Angelyn’s scientific background allows her to engage directly with researchers and move quickly from complex science to its legal and commercial implications. Before entering patent law, she conducted postdoctoral research at Harvard Medical School, developing chemical tools to study peroxisomal membrane protein transport. She earned her Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where her research combined organic chemistry and biochemistry to study protein glycosylation, and earlier worked as a research scientist in the biotechnology industry, developing antibody-drug conjugates for targeted cancer therapy at Seattle Genetics. Her scientific research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals including Nature Chemical Biology, Biochemistry, and Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry.

Clients value Angelyn’s ability to understand both the science in front of them and the company they are trying to build around it. She takes a practical, forward-looking approach to intellectual property, helping founders, scientists, investors, and business leaders make decisions that account for where the technology is today, where it may go next, and what the company will need from its patent portfolio as it grows.