Sector strengths

Life Sciences & Healthcare

From discovery to commercialization, we help life sciences and healthcare innovators turn scientific breakthroughs into real-world solutions

We guide biotech, healthcare, medtech, and pharmaceutical enterprises—public and private, large and small—in solving their legal problems at every stage of growth. We offer experienced guidance through the sector’s complex regulatory, transactional, operational, financial, compliance issues and disputes.

Life sciences and healthcare organizations depend on experienced representation in business, legal, and regulatory matters. Our biotechnology and pharmaceutical teams support clients developing and commercializing products and services that diagnose, prevent, and treat disease. We also advise clients in the medical device and medtech sectors on technologies spanning cardiovascular, diabetes, gastroenterology, imaging systems, implants, neurology, optics, pain management, renal care, stimulation devices, and surgical tools.

We are an innovation partner to clients, helping them grow from the ground up to publicly traded Fortune 500 companies. Our lawyers counsel clients on intellectual property matters, fundraising, strategic alliances, collaborations, licenses, and other technology transactions, beginning with early-stage companies.

We advise healthcare providers and organizations, hospitals, insurers, research institutions, and companies throughout the industry on digital health services, FDA and controlled substance issues, transactions, managed care, litigation, operations and policy, regulatory compliance, reimbursement, data privacy and security, contracts and associated disputes, internal investigations, government audits and investigations, antitrust, taxes, M&A, and real estate.

Our IP team offers boutique capabilities within a global, full-service firm. With a proven track record, we represent pharmaceutical and biotechnology clients in complex, high-stakes patent litigation in federal district courts across the United States and before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and U.S. International Trade Commission. We guide clients through inter partes review, ex parte reexamination, derivation, and interference proceedings before the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), and we prosecute and manage patent portfolios. Furthermore, we counsel pharmaceutical companies on regulatory strategies and all aspects of the Hatch-Waxman Act and Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act (BPCIA). Our global presence allows us to assemble strong teams around the world.

Industry and technical strength

Our lawyers know the industry, as well as the laws and regulations that apply to it. Many of our life science lawyers have advanced degrees in various disciplines of biology, chemistry, engineering, and computer science.

Strategic advice

Ashurst Perkins Coie’s teams of lawyers, patent agents, and science advisers understand the inherent challenges of clients’ collective mission to cure disease and improve people’s health, as well as the regulations that govern these pursuits.

Advanced industry knowledge

Our areas of focus span a broad range of cutting-edge life sciences and health tech technologies. These include AI-based diagnostics and drug discovery, next-generation antibody therapeutics, biologics and biosimilars, cancer diagnostics, therapeutics, vaccines, cellular therapeutics, gene editing and gene therapy, cfDNA diagnostics and NIPT, CAR-T, T-cell receptor therapy, next-generation and third-generation sequencing, peptide therapeutics, and small molecule therapeutics.