A conversation with Gary Gustafson, Ph.D.
Gary Gustafson, Ph.D., a medicinal chemist turned CAS IP expert, spent decades in the lab and in industry, including roles at startup companies developing new therapeutics. In this Q&A, Gary discusses practical IP considerations, emerging drug development trends, and why early decisions matter for long-term success.
What drew you from medicinal chemistry into intellectual property and your current role at CAS?
Throughout grad school and my postdoc, I was always fascinated by the drug development process, thinking how can we do this better, faster, smarter? Those questions naturally pulled me toward industry, and I ended up working for quite a few startups.
I loved the startup environment. Since there’s a very limited number of people, you have to wear lots of hats, so I was engaged in all different aspects of drug development. My proudest career achievement was helping develop an FDA-approved therapeutic, Olutasidenib, for acute myeloid leukemia.
I also spent time teaching in higher ed, but an opportunity at CAS came along at exactly the right moment. It felt like the perfect fit, combining my scientific expertise with the opportunity to help companies solve tricky problems.
Looking back on your time in the lab, what do you wish you had understood earlier about the IP process?
One of the first things everyone focused on was our own capabilities—what was our technological advantage? But we also needed to ask ourselves the question, “What can we do that has sufficient white space and IP potential?”
In several cases, we did a lot of work discovering active chemical matter only to realize the space was already a minefield. It just wasn’t feasible in an IP context.
Now, I advise clients to start by asking: where is the white space, and how crowded is this area? You need to know that before investing significant time and money.
Thanks Gary, that’s a great point. We consistently hear that project prioritization is a major challenge in early-stage drug discovery. How can IP professionals help?
Think of early IP searches as a litmus test. If I’m assessing five potential projects and one has a crowded patent landscape, that’s a sign it should probably move down the priority list. If another has relatively open space, it’s likely a safer bet. Doing thorough IP work upfront helps teams focus on viable paths and avoid surprises downstream.
Given your experience in both drug discovery and IP, what do you view as the most significant risks companies face if they don’t prioritize early IP searches?
If you are not extremely thorough in assessing the literature and patent landscape early on, you’re setting yourself up for a potentially catastrophic surprise. You might hit a legal roadblock right when you’re ready to enter the clinic or gain an approval, all because someone else holds IP you didn’t uncover at the start.
That kind of oversight can be devastating. I’ve seen companies have to make the difficult choice to lay off a large segment of their research force to focus on what’s still viable or revenue-generating.
I would venture to say that a well-maintained and protected IP portfolio is one of the most critical assets a company can have. It’s your best defense against those kinds of high-stakes surprises.
That’s a lot of pressure. When millions of dollars depend on your IP search, how can you be confident you’ve found everything important?
It’s a balancing act of ensuring you capture all relevant information without drowning in results. Sometimes people say, 'We're getting back too many answers.” But the opposite scenario—conducting a quick search, finding three results, and assuming you’re good to go—is far riskier. No one wants to discover patents they missed after spending years and millions of dollars.
That’s why we’ve indexed concepts, substances, and reactions, and built powerful filters to help users cut through the noise while still surfacing everything that matters. When researchers or IP professionals use those tools to craft thoughtful searches, they end up much more confident in the results. And of course, access to up-to-date, comprehensive content is an essential part of the equation.
Can you elaborate on what access to “comprehensive content” means when doing IP searches for pharma and biotech R&D?
People in the scientific community are pretty much universally realizing how important it is to have not only all the data but all the right data. That means clean data that's actionable, useful, and leads to the best decision-making process.
But what a lot of people don't understand is that not all content is curated appropriately. Everyone's heard the phrase “garbage in, garbage out,” right? If you start with poor data, any type of algorithm or pattern you try to distill from it will be poor at best.
That's one of the things that really differentiates CAS. We cover all relevant content, but we also curate it to ensure quality. That level of data quality assurance is absolutely critical for therapeutic development, and especially so for biologics, where molecules are often very large, complex, and multi-component.
Let's talk innovation. Protein-protein interactions are emerging as exciting IP territory. Why is this area gaining attention?
I've been a big follower of protein-protein interactions (PPIs), and even written about their applications in cancer treatment. Currently, the vast majority of drugs act through a single protein target, but so many body processes are governed by protein-protein interactions.
Scientists have called them “undruggable” for the past 10 or 15 years due to their massive size and the inherent difficulty of creating crystal structures. However, with the Nobel Prize last year and innovations like AlphaFold, we've opened up more than tenfold additional potential targets.
I picture it as the Gold Rush in California. People are rushing into the field now, trying to carve out chemical space with ambitions to innovate and identify PPIs to inhibit. It’s a huge new area with vast amounts of IP potential.
In competitive therapeutic areas like GLP-1 receptor agonists, how are pharma companies navigating dense patent landscapes?
There can be a lot of differentiators in a project, and a lot of ways you can carve out your own piece of IP potential. Formulations are a big one. Are your competitors developing tablets? Injectables only? Suspensions? That’s where you need to very closely monitor the literature. Researchers will benefit from a comprehensive view not only of what’s out there already, but what doesn’t exist yet.
What do you see as the next big therapeutics market?
One of the things I love about science is that three years from now, there’s going to be some tremendous field that we don’t even have an inkling about right now.
I will say that over the past 5–10 years, I’ve been amazed at how much progress has been made in RNA therapeutics. During COVID, mRNA vaccines went from concept to reality incredibly quickly. It is still a rapidly growing field, and I’m confident we’ll continue to see creative applications of RNA across a wide range of therapeutic areas.
Given changing political and regulatory landscapes, how are scientific organizations adapting their IP strategies?
Organizations know that agility is key. When certain areas get deprioritized, you have to quickly recognize that shift, revisit the literature, take stock of your capabilities, and drive toward new areas of innovation while winter passes in others.
As much as we like to focus on the science, it’s always a mix of science and commerce. That’s why I think the history of IP law and patents, especially in the context of drug development, is so fascinating. Without the ability to protect your inventions and generate a return, the incentive and ability to develop new therapies weakens.
Returning to your point, innovators and researchers need tools that help them react in real time to changing regulations, political environments, supply chain issues, and other pressures. Access to the full breadth and depth of IP and scientific information makes it easier to sidestep, refocus, and re-energize a company around new opportunities.
Have mergers and acquisitions become a bigger part of strategic IP management?
Funnily enough, I have a huge amount of M&A experience from my time working for startup companies—all but one were acquired. I know from the executive point of view, companies spend a lot of time and money surveying their IP portfolios, identifying gaps, then surveying new companies with competitive advantages and the potential for collaboration or acquisition.
That is something going on in almost every board meeting for every company in the world. It’s the lifeblood of these companies. Having the ability to search patents of potential M&A targets is critical for identifying valuable innovations and reducing long-term risks.
A final question: What is the value that early IP insights bring to the drug discovery journey?
Drug discovery is expensive. Comprehensive IP searches allow companies to thoroughly and quickly access relevant information, prioritize the right projects, and protect what they’re developing. Doing IP work upfront leads to fewer landmines downstream and gives you a strategic edge throughout the entire process.
Gary Gustafson, a senior customer success specialist at CAS, is a subject matter expert in medicinal chemistry, pharma/biotech IP, and product development. He holds a Ph.D. in chemistry from Brown University and completed postdoctoral research on unnatural amino acids. With 25 years of experience in the drug development industry, Gary was part of the team that developed Olutasidenib, an FDA-approved treatment for acute myeloid leukemia. At CAS, he draws on both his scientific expertise and industry experience to help innovators solve problems and accelerate discovery.