Alan Heinrich’s practice focuses on intellectual property litigation. He has extensive experience litigating patents in the fields of biotechnology, medical devices and high tech. He has been a member of trial teams that have obtained multi-hundred million-dollar judgments on behalf of patent owners and have also successfully defended against multi-hundred million-dollar damages claims on behalf of accused infringers.
Alan previously served on Irell & Manella LLP’s Executive Committee and as chair of the firm's Hiring Committee. He is an adjunct faculty member at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he teaches Patent Intensive, an advanced patent law seminar, and has also taught Patent Law and Federal Courts at Loyola Law School.
Experience
- Juno Therapeutics, Inc. et al. v. Kite Pharma Inc. (C.D. Cal.). Represents Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, an affiliate of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and its exclusive licensee, Juno Therapeutics, a developer of cellular immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer, in a patent infringement lawsuit against Juno’s competitor, Kite Pharma Inc. The lawsuit involves U.S. Patent No. 7,446,190, which covers, among other things, a construct for a chimeric T cell receptor that includes a specific CD28 co-stimulatory domain and targets the antigen CD-19 for the treatment of B cell cancers, such as leukemia and lymphomas.
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Kite Pharma v. Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer Research (PTAB). Represented Sloan Kettering and Juno Therapeutics in an inter partes review (IPR) proceeding before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). Juno’s competitor Kite sought to invalidate all claims of U.S. Patent No. 7,446,190. The PTAB upheld the validity of all claims of the patent in a final written decision, which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit summarily affirmed in June 2018.
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VLSI Technology LLC v. Intel Corporation (W.D. Tex). Represents VLSI Technology LLC in a patent infringement lawsuit against Intel Corporation. The lawsuit involves two patents that improve the speed and performance of microprocessors. In March 2021, a jury found that Intel infringed the patents in suit, rejected Intel’s invalidity defense, and awarded $2.18 billion in reasonable royalty damages. In April 2022, a judge issued a $2.3 billion final judgment in the case.
- Alector v. Asa Abeliovich, M.D., Ph.D. (JAMS arbitration). Represented prominent neuroscientist and drug developer Asa Abeliovich, the founder and CEO of Prevail Therapeutics, a company developing gene therapies for patients suffering from neurodegenerative diseases, in a trade secret arbitration proceeding. The case involved allegations that Prevail’s work was based on Alector’s alleged trade secrets, for which Alector sought relief in the form of substantial monetary damages as well as ownership rights to Prevail’s intellectual property estate. After a two-week arbitration hearing, the arbitrator rejected all of the principal claims against Dr. Abeliovich, including all claims alleging misappropriation or misuse of trade secrets and confidential information.
- Koninklijke Philips N.V. et al. v. ZOLL Medical Corp. (D. Mass.). Represented ZOLL Medical Corp. in a patent infringement lawsuit brought by its competitor Philips relating to external defibrillator technology. Irell took over the case from other counsel in 2014 after a loss at the liability phase. Philips initially sought over $900 million in damages. After Irell succeeded in knocking out some claims on appeal of the liability judgment, Philips reduced its damages claim to $217 million. In August 2017, a jury returned a verdict in which it rejected Philips’s claim for lost profits damages, found that ZOLL did not willfully infringe and awarded Philips a net of $7.1 million in damages, less than four percent of Philips’s claimed damages.
- Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, et al. v. Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, et al (D. Mass.). Represented Alnylam and the Max Planck Institute in a complex patent dispute concerning rights to fundamental technology covered in two families of patent applications in the field of RNA interference (gene silencing). The case was successfully resolved on favorable terms through a creative settlement that used co-ownership rights and other cooperative mechanisms to overcome U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) rejections in both patent application families, leading to a robust estate of issued patents.
News
Honors & Awards
- Selected to the Southern California Super Lawyers list in the area of intellectual property litigation (2013-2022)
- Selected to the Southern California Rising Stars list in the area of intellectual property litigation (2006-2011)
Publications
- “The Myriad Reasons to Hit ‘Reset’ on Patent-Eligibility Jurisprudence,” 47 Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 117 (2013)
Practice Areas
Education
Loyola Law School (J.D., 2000), summa cum laude; Valedictorian
State University of New York at Buffalo (Ph.D., 1996)
Washington and Lee University (B.A., 1990), magna cum laude; Phi Beta Kappa
Admissions
- California, 2001
- U.S. District Court for the Central and Northern Districts of California
- U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth and Federal Circuits
Clerkships
- Hon. Diarmuid F. O'Scannlain, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit