Dr. Ken Kalafus works on patent matters in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, with extensive experience in technologies including therapeutic antibodies, vaccines, embryonic stem cells, cell- and gene-based therapies, genetic engineering (e.g., CRISPR), and high-throughput sequencing methods.
Dr. Kalafus assists clients with all phases of biotechnology patent procurement, including evaluation of invention disclosures, patentability studies, and patent application drafting and prosecution. His practice includes preparation of patent applications for prosecution (and potential enforcement) internationally. His clients range in size from start-ups to multinational companies.
Dr. Kalafus also conducts freedom-to-operate analyses and assists clients with development of strategies to design around and/or invalidate patents of concern.
Dr. Kalafus also has significant post-grant patent experience, including initiating and defending ex parte patent reexamination requests in the U.S., and oppositions in Europe.
As a doctoral student and postdoctoral research fellow at Baylor College of Medicine, Dr. Kalafus conducted research including use of yeast as a model system to study the contribution of a DNA repair and recombination complex to chromosome stability and telomere maintenance, and development of methods for efficient mapping of bacterial artificial chromosome libraries for use in mammalian genome sequencing. He also contributed to the Rat Genome Sequencing Project by developing methods for large-scale, parallel, high-efficiency DNA sequence analysis that were used to detect and correct genome assembly errors. His additional laboratory research experience includes identification of potential cancer vaccine peptides at the Department of Immunology at City of Hope National Medical Center.