Sarah Hennebry

Sarah specialises in drafting and prosecuting patent matters in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors. With over 15 years of experience in intellectual property practice, Sarah now focuses her practice on immunology and oncology therapeutics, including antibodies, related molecular targeted therapies and therapeutic proteins. Sarah also handles innovations relating to microbe- and protein-based vaccines and cell therapies.

Sarah establishes a deep understanding of her clients’ inventions and commercial needs to streamline and manage their patent portfolios across multiple jurisdictions. She also has experience managing complex patent portfolios across the US, Europe, Southeast Asia and South America for larger corporations.

Sarah also provides advice to investors and industry stakeholders as part of due diligence reviews of patent portfolios, including preparing detailed freedom to operate and validity opinions. This work also enables Sarah to provide commercially relevant advice to her clients who are seeking to build robust IP portfolios that are ready for investor scrutiny.

Prior to joining FPA, Sarah completed a PhD at the University of Melbourne. This included work in diverse fields including bioinformatics, protein structure and function, microbiology and infectious diseases.

Following her PhD, Sarah completed 3 years of post-doctoral research at the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute. Her work there included the identification of biomarkers and investigation of molecular pathways associated with sympathetic nervous system activation in the context of neuropsychiatric disorders and chronic renal, cardiovascular and metabolic diseases.

It’s this experience that Sarah draws on in her practice today, where she works with a diverse range of clients, including universities and research institutes at various stages of the business cycle, including identification and capture of early-stage innovations.

Sarah’s specific areas of technical expertise include:

• antibodies and therapeutic proteins for use in a variety of applications including oncology and treatment of inflammatory disorders;
• in vitro diagnostics;
• small molecule pharmaceuticals for use in treating disorders of the renal/cardiovascular system;
• infectious diseases and vaccines for the prevention of infectious diseases;
• genome technologies; and
• agrigenetics.