Laura Fritts (Courtesy photo)

Fritts, a veteran of intellectual property work at big law firms, oversees patent and license strategy and all IP matters at Emory University's office commercializing inventions developed by Emory researchers. In March, just as she had to shift her workspace from the campus to her kitchen table, she was focused on a discovery called EIDD-2801.

The research behind EIDD-2801 started in 2014 under federal defense contracts for a treatment against potentially weaponized encephalitis, but it evolved into an agent that could stop a broad range of viruses from reproducing. When the novel coronavirus started killing people in China in January, Emory's nonprofit biotechnology company, Drug Innovation Ventures at Emory, or DRIVE, identified EIDD-2801 as a potential treatment.

DRIVE wanted to sell a license to a Miami company, Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, which received plaudits for its work on an Ebola drug in 2018. If the license could be completed, Ridgeback would test the drug and, if successful, produce it for a desperate world market.

"I didn't want our office holding up the deal," Fritts said.

Neither did anyone else. "It became a mad scramble," said David Perryman, an IP lawyer who is DRIVE's chief operating officer. He suggested that the intellectual property work for a transaction like the Ridgeback license would typically take four to six months, but it was accomplished in two weeks.

Perryman credited the quick deal to an executive-to-executive negotiating process that started in the middle, "not the extremes," and fast, focused work by Fritts and her colleagues at Emory's Office of Technology Transfer, Eversheds Sutherland IP partner Peter Quittmeyer and patent lawyer Christopher Curfman of Meunier Carlin & Curfman.

The terms of the transaction weren't disclosed, but Fritts said to move this quickly, "There had to be a good bit of trust" between the parties, starting with their supposed "last best offer."

Ridgeback  was represented by Judith Hasko of Latham & Watkins in Menlo Park, California. Through a firm spokeswoman, Hasko declined to discuss the deal.

Peter Quittmeyer. (Courtesy photo)

Quittmeyer, the outside counsel, said he is used to clients moving very fast, but "there was definitely an urgency to this." He estimated that the parties had 90% of their issues agreed upon when negotiations started.

Moreover, he recalled a similar matter that went through 27 drafts of its contract. The Emory-Ridgeback deal had fewer than 10.

"Everyone knew you were talking about, potentially, lives" at stake, Quittmeyer said.

He added that Emory's technology transfer team, which had to work on a host of federal and university requirements, "really turned it around in miraculous time."

Curfman's role was to support DRIVE's deal team with information about global patent strategy, such as how one could file for patents in different countries and how those processes can be expedited.