OVERVIEW
Kiruthika, a Patent Agent, is an expert in organic synthesis and medicinal chemistry in the Life Sciences Group. She leverages her training in organic chemistry to assist with a variety of Intellectual Property matters, including drafting and prosecuting patent applications for several pharmaceutical and biotechnology clients. She also handles due diligence investigations and freedom-to-operate analyses for clients.
Before joining the firm, Kiruthika served as a senior scientist at Venenum Biodesign where she facilitated small molecule drug discovery. Her work focused on early-stage drug discovery, identifying hits, and interpreting structure-activity relationships. She also addressed ADME challenges for lead generation and optimization by designing and constructing scaffolds against novel drug targets in immuno-oncology, infectious diseases, and metabolic disorders.
Kiruthika holds a Ph.D. and M.S. from the University of Madras in Organic Chemistry. Her master’s research constructed three generations of thiophene-BINOL-based dendrimers, which attracted the attention of chemists due to their unique chiro-optical and medicinal properties. Kiruthika’s doctoral research focused on methodology development for constructing heterocycles using transition metal catalysis and multicomponent reactions involving alkynes. Her work utilized the less-exploited copper-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions of ynamides to develop interesting heterocyclic scaffolds – which have extensive applications in medicinal chemistry and material science in an inter/intramolecular one-pot fashion. She further used multicomponent reactions to create spirocycles involving electron-deficient alkynes that are otherwise complex to synthesize.