Dr. Powers is an associate in the Litigation Group. He is responsible for a variety of matters including district court litigation, inter partes review proceedings, intellectual property strategy, evaluating patent portfolios, drafting patent applications and prosecuting interferences. He also manages the preparation of invalidity, non-infringement, and freedom-to-operate opinions. Dr. Powers has significant technical experience in the fields of aging, surgery, stem cell biology, microbiology, metabolic engineering, synthetic biology and biotechnology.
Dr. Powers earned his B.A. in biology from the University of Virginia. Then he received his Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. There, he developed high-throughput assays for measuring the life span of eukaryotic cells. Screens carried out using these methods led Dr. Powers and his colleagues to discover that reduction in TOR pathway signaling is one mechanism by which caloric restriction extends life span. These findings were published in the journals Science and Genes and Development and led to a patent application that is currently pending. Ongoing work in several labs has confirmed that the methods identified by Dr. Powers extend life span in mammals.
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