Booster Shot

For more than 25 years, the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology has been a hub for the legal and regulatory intersection of the cutting edge — a lodestar for academics, practitioners, and students at Berkeley Law and around the world.

Now, with COVID-19 driving home the importance of breakthrough medical technologies and the biotech industry booming in the Bay Area, BCLT is adding a life sciences initiative to its already robust agenda. The Life Sciences Project will explore intellectual property, innovation, and regulatory issues across myriad products and technologies, from drug discovery to artificial intelligence to healthcare data.

“Life science is not just biotech. It’s health tech, medical devices, and also the social issues around health policy,” says BCLT Executive Director Wayne Stacy. “This life sciences group has become so important.”

He sees the project complementing BCLT’s core pillars — patents, copyrights, and trade regulation; privacy and cyber; technology and societal impact; and information technology — as computer science and biological science become more intertwined.

The idea came from Wilson Sonsini partner and Berkeley Law lecturer Vern Norviel, who has worked with life science companies for three decades. Walking to the BART station one day, he passed the special parking spaces that UC Berkeley reserves for its Nobel laureates.

“It struck me that the law school was only a few feet away, and there should be a much better bridge to the rest of the university in the life sciences,” Norviel says.

He and his firm donated to the new initiative, as did fellow project founders Genentech, Gilead, and Weil Gotshal & Manges LLP. BCLT and its faculty directors, including Professors Peter Menell and Robert Merges, also helped bring the endeavor to life.

Allison Schmitt ’15, a seasoned life sciences litigator with a Ph.D. in chemistry, leads the project. She calls this a pivotal time for life sciences research and developments in the legal infrastructure supporting it, pointing to the mRNA vaccines developed to combat the COVID pandemic as a telling example.

“We’re now engaging in debates surrounding the proper legal frameworks for protecting those inventions,” Schmitt says. “Startups in the life science space are gaining real traction towards bringing their transformative technologies to fruition, and digital technology is changing the ways in which life science research is conducted and brought to market.”

The project will promote research on where scholars can help move the law forward, expand BCLT’s research agenda to confront ethical and societal concerns around technology, and build a sense of community among lawyers practicing in the life sciences sector.

“That community is important because often they’re going to see problems and issues long before they even surface in the academic world,” Stacy says. “That’s one of the great things Allison will be introducing — to help them really work as a single unit.”

— Gwyneth K. Shaw