Hedie Meka.

Hedie is an accomplished practitioner who works with clients to identify, capture, protect, and manage their intellectual property rights including patents and trade marks. Hedie has extensive experience in drafting and prosecuting local and foreign patent applications in biotechnology, life sciences, and general mechanical inventions. In addition to patent drafting and prosecution, Hedie provides advice and opinions on patentability, validity, infringement, and freedom to operate, and acts in contentious actions such as re-examination.

Hedie specialises in all areas of biotechnology and life sciences including virology, molecular and cell biology, protein biochemistry, medical biotechnology, diagnostics and plant innovations. In her practice, Hedie has worked with individual inventors, biotechnology companies, spin-offs, SMEs, co-operative research centres, universities and research institutes to achieve diverse intellectual property goals for each organisation.

In addition to patent drafting and prosecution, Hedie provides advice and opinions regarding patentability, validity, infringement, inventorship determinations, and freedom to operate, and acts in contentious actions such as re-examination.

In giving considered and thorough advice to clients, Hedie draws on several years of discovery research experience both in Australia and abroad. Hedie’s post-graduate studies were conducted in the field of molecular virology at the University of Queensland where she investigated the molecular replication of RNA viruses pathogenic to humans. In particular, members of the Flavivirus family (Dengue virus, Kunjin virus), hepatitis D virus and hepatitis B virus.

She has also held a postdoctoral research position at Imperial College (London) where her work focussed on the relationship between structure and function of subunits of RNA polymerase II. Hedie carried out postdoctoral research into the structural biology of membrane transport proteins at Oxford University.

Hedie has significant in-house commercial experience. She has held the position of Director of Intellectual Property and Regulatory Affairs at a publicly listed Australian-based biotechnology company. In this role, Hedie managed a large and established intellectual property portfolio and also protected new product concepts for pipeline development. Hedie was involved in licensing activities to achieve strategic commercial outcomes for the company. She has experience in the preparation and prosecution of regulatory documents for submission to healthcare regulators in Europe (EMA and MHRA) and the USA (FDA) for product marketing approval, clinical trial design, and Investigational New Drug applications.

In addition to publishing her scientific research and in the field of intellectual property law, Hedie presented her scientific research at various local and overseas conferences as well as being a guest lecturer at the University of Queensland on the topic of intellectual property.