Zeba Ali

Zeba Ali

Zeba Ali joined Kenyon & Kenyon as an associate in 2000. Since joining the firm, Ms. Ali has been involved in a wide variety of intellectual property matters, such as patent preparation, prosecution, due diligence (including clearance, patentability and landscape searches and opinions), and counseling. Ms. Ali’s practice particularly focuses on the biomedical arts, such as medical devices, treatments and procedures in the neurological, cardiac and orthopedic fields.

Ms. Ali has significant experience with neuroscience technology. For example, Ms. Ali represents clients in the field of deep brain stimulation and other forms of neuromodulation, including electrode designs, implantable pulse generator designs, waveform generation, computer modeling of the brain and other neural tissue in response to electrical stimulation, and programmer interfaces. She also represents clients targeting specific neurological conditions such as stroke, traumatic brain injury, psychiatric disorders, autism, and neurodegenerative disorders.

Ms. Ali has also prosecuted patent applications in the drug delivery field. For example, Ms. Ali has drafted and/or prosecuted applications involving catheters, stents, angioplasty balloons, grafts, and cannulas. In the orthopedic field, Ms. Ali has drafted and/or prosecuted applications to surgical fasteners, fixation devices, bone tamping devices, prosthetics, and other devices.

Ms. Ali also has substantial experience drafting applications directed to methods of treating medical conditions. She is familiar with the nuances of drafting claims to such subject matter based on extensive experience prosecuting such applications in front of the U.S. Patent Office, including numerous interviews with patent examiners. This has led to a greater understanding of how to include limitations in such claims that result in allowable subject matter but that are also broad enough to provide commercial value to her clients.

Ms. Ali has drafted over 150 domestic patent applications and conducted approximately 30 due diligences for universities and research institutes, biomedical companies, venture capital firms, and start-up companies. She also has drafted invention disclosure guidelines for clients and conducted seminars for in-house counsel relating to various intellectual property topics including how to offensively and defensively protect a company’s commercial products.

During her undergraduate studies, Ms. Ali worked in a molecular neurobiology and pharmacology lab studying the effects of various agents on neuronal death.