James is a Technical Advisor with more than a decade of life sciences research experience who assists clients with patent drafting and prosecution and strategic patent portfolio management. He has a broad range of capabilities spanning the areas of antibody-based therapies, cancer biology, immunology, nanoparticles, CRISPR-gene editing, personalized medicine, mass spectrometry instrumentation and data analysis, miRNAs, drug screening platform development, molecular diagnostics, 3D organoid culture systems, immunotoxins, protein structure-function analysis, extracellular vesicles, mouse models of disease, and cellular therapies.

Prior to joining Mintz, James was a postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a fellow in the school’s patent law training program. In his patent fellowship, he prepared patentability assessments for life sciences patents, drafted freedom to operate analyses, and performed IP due diligence and patent landscape analysis to assist in the strategic planning of portfolios. His research work included identifying a novel role for cell adhesion to regulate cell metabolism and mitochondrial function in metastatic breast cancer. He also developed an in vitro co-culture system to screen novel compounds to inhibit brain metastasis and performed pre-clinical drug screens on primary breast cancer organoids to identify potential drug treatment compounds. Earlier, as a research associate at a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, he developed a phage display screening platform and engineered next-generation immunotoxins to identify novel cancer therapeutics, performed pre-clinical evaluation of immunotoxins, and helped draft US and international patent applications related to this research.

While earning his PhD, James identified a TGFβ-regulated miRNA linked to endothelial cell function during tumor angiogenesis and tumor growth and made presentations about the findings at three international conferences. He also designed in vivo nanoparticle studies to test novel cancer therapies through the delivery of miRNA, molecular therapeutics, or both to specific cell types and created mouse models to audit extracellular vesicles and endothelial cells in healthy and diseased tissues. He also received a postdoctoral fellowship grant from the National Cancer Institute to focus on training for fundamental cancer research.