Devoted to Corporate Attorneys, Corporate Lawyers, and Corporate Counsel

The offices of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pitman, LLP was the venue for a talk by Dr. Ravi Kiron, PhD, MBA on March 14, 2007.  Dr. Kiron began one month ago a business called Life Tech Innovations LLC.  He is the chief operating officer of this firm.  Formerly, he worked at ALZA/Johnson & Johnson in tech assessment and planning.  He said that ALZA/Johnson & Johnson had an entire department dedicated to studying nanotechnology. 

Dr. Kiron spoke about the impact of nanotechnology in various industries, including IT, energy, environment, materials science.  He said that this led to cross-industry and university ownership of patents.  There has been a huge amount of patents granted in the nanotechnology field in the last five years.

Because of the novelty of nanotechnology, regulatory industries such as the FDA, USPTO need to understand how nanotechnology is defined in order to make policies for advancing the field.  In 2007, nanotechnology still has not had any major identified opportunities to get the government and the public involved.