Dr. Kiruthika Elamparuthi

Kiruthika leverages her experience in organic chemistry to advise clients on patent portfolio strategies, patentability, freedom-to-operate (FTO) and due diligence.

Kiruthika focuses on chemical and pharmaceutical intellectual property matters, including drafting and prosecuting patent applications before the US Patent and Trademark Office and foreign patent offices. She uses her training in organic chemistry to assist and advise clients on patent portfolio management strategies, evaluations and opinions on patentability, FTO, clearance and transactional due diligence.

Before joining Cooley, Kiruthika worked at various global law firms as a patent agent in life sciences patent prosecution. Before practicing law, Kiruthika was a senior scientist at a drug discovery company, facilitating small-molecule drug discovery. Her work focused on early-stage drug discovery, identifying hits and interpreting structure-activity relationships, addressing absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion challenges for lead generation and optimization, and designing and constructing novel drug scaffolds for immune-oncology, infectious diseases and metabolic disorders. This work as a medicinal chemist resulted in Kiruthika being listed as a co-inventor on patent applications. 

Kiruthika holds a PhD in organic chemistry and received the Best Thesis Award. Her research focused on methodology development for constructing heterocycles using transition-metal catalysis and multicomponent reactions involving alkynes. Kiruthika utilized less-exploited copper-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions of ynamides to develop interesting heterocyclic scaffolds with extensive applications in medicinal chemistry and material science, using an inter/intramolecular one-pot approach.