Gurunathan Laxmikanthan

Gurunathan Laxmikanthan, Ph.D. is a partner in Nutter’s Intellectual Property Department. He provides assistance on patent prosecution, freedom-to-operate analysis in Series A, B, and C funding, interference proceedings, and infringement enforcement strategies in the fields of biochemistry, immunology, molecular and structural biology, and small molecules. Venture capital firms rely on Guru to conduct intellectual property due diligence. He frequently advises startup pharmaceutical and biotech companies.

Guru’s extensive experience in biotech and life sciences encompasses many areas of research, including proteases, recombinases, organic and inorganic chemistry, structure-based drug design, electron microscopy, X-ray crystallography, and molecular modeling. He has developed novel structural methods using methylases to improve the contrast and signal-to-noise ratio for the feature of small macromolecular complexes in electron microscopy. Guru has successfully engineered a bi-directional Cre recombinase into a unidirectional co-factor dependent recombinase, identical to the classic paradigm system of Lambda integrase. In addition, he has designed a new method for assaying potential activators of proteases using hybrid proteins containing fragments from Fibroblast growth factors and sequences of preforms of kallikreins. He has also solved a high-resolution crystal structure of human kallikrein 1 during his graduate work.