Steve Schilling focuses his practice on all services relating to biotechnology and life sciences patents, including patent application drafting and prosecution, patent counseling and strategic planning, patentability opinions and freedom-to-operate opinions. Steve has a technical background in molecular biology, cell biology, genetics, genomics, cell signaling, cancer biology, stem cell biology and agricultural biotechnology. He has extensive experience drafting and prosecuting patent applications in technologies directed to genome editing, CRISPR-Cas technology, and transgenic organisms. He also has extensive experience drafting and prosecuting patent applications in technologies related to immunotherapies, including recombinant vaccines using live, attenuated bacterial vectors to express proteins for cancer immunotherapy. Steve’s clients include leading biopharmaceutical companies, agricultural biotechnology companies, and clinical stage biotechnology companies developing technologies ranging from genome editing platforms to transgenic plants to vaccines for treating cancer.
Steve received his A.B. in biophysical chemistry, summa cum laude, from Dartmouth College, where he was awarded the Chandler T. White 1916 Research Prize for his research on photorespiration in Arabidopsis. He received his Ph.D. in pharmacology from Duke University, where he was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and coauthored several book chapters and journal publications. Steve received his J.D., magna cum laude, from Duke University School of Law. While at Duke Law, he served on the board of directors of the Intellectual Property and Cyberlaw Society and on the editorial board of the Duke Law Journal.
Before joining Alston & Bird, Steve worked as a licensing assistant in the Office of Technology Transfer at North Carolina State University, where he assessed the marketability and patentability of biotechnology inventions, drafted agreements and marketed inventions to biotechnology companies.
