Dr. Sonnenfeld is a partner in the Intellectual Property Group in the New York office. He has been practicing biotechnology and pharmaceutical patent law for twenty-five years. His practice focuses on various interparty matters including due diligence, litigation, foreign oppositions and licensing. He also handles complex strategic patent prosecution in the United States Patent & Trademark Office as well as supervising foreign prosecution. Dr. Sonnenfeld represents both large multinational corporations and start up companies.
Dr. Sonnenfeld has advised companies in a variety of technologies, including small molecule therapeutics, immunology, vaccines, neurobiology, growth factors, PCR, lipid based drug delivery systems, gene therapy, phage display, recombinant protein expression, diagnostics, cancer chemotherapeutics, CNS drug discovery and microarrays. Prior to his career in law, Dr. Sonnenfeld was a research assistant professor at The Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York investigating the cell biology and hormone responsiveness of neuronal tumors. Dr. Sonnenfeld’s doctoral research in pharmacology involved studies of growth factors and their receptors.
Dr. Sonnenfeld is admitted to the bar of the U.S Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and the U.S. District Courts for the Eastern and Southern Districts of New York, and United States Supreme Court. He is also admitted to the bar of the states of New York and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He is registered to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Dr. Sonnenfeld is a member of the Federal Circuit Bar Association, American Bar Association, New York State Bar Association, American Intellectual Property Law Association, and New York Intellectual Property Law Association.
Dr. Sonnenfeld received a B.A, cum laude, from Kenyon College in The Chemical Basis of Behavior, his M.A., M.Phil and Ph.D. in pharmacology from Columbia University and his J.D. from Fordham University Law School. He is frequently an invited speaker at biotechnology patent law conferences and has been an instructor for ACI’s master class in biotechnology patent drafting and practice.
