Dr. Matthew Stevens

Matthew’s practice focuses on drafting and prosecuting domestic and international patent applications, with an emphasis on the fields of small-molecule therapeutics, drug discovery and biotechnology. In addition to his prosecution practice, Matthew also has substantial experience in patent invalidity and infringement, freedom-to-operate, and patentability analyses.

Before his experience as a patent agent, Matthew obtained his PhD in chemistry from Stanford University, working under the supervision of Dr. Paul Wender as a National Science Foundation Research Fellow. His doctoral research focused on the scalable total synthesis of bryostatin 1, a complex marine natural product that is being investigated in clinical studies as a first-in-class latency reversal agent for the eradication of HIV, and as a potential therapeutic for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and cancer. Additionally, he developed novel rhodium-catalyzed cycloaddition reactions that he applied to the synthesis of small-molecule kinase inhibitors. Matthew completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Stanford School of Medicine in the lab of Dr. Daria Mochly-Rosen, where he designed and synthesized small-molecule agonists of novel high-frequency variants of ALDH2, which he helped identify and characterize.

While at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst for his undergraduate studies, Matthew developed molecular probes for the real-time in vivo and ex vivo imaging of neurological systems and developed a library of histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitor prodrugs. He also conducted research on photoswitchable catalysts for applications in self-healing materials at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin under two consecutive American Chemical Society (ACS)/ German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) fellowships.

Matthew is particularly passionate about entrepreneurial translational medicine. At Stanford, he co-led a team that was awarded seed funding from the SPARK Program in Translational Research to develop and investigate drugs for the treatment of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). He continues to serve as an advisor for SPARK. Matthew conducted medicinal chemistry internships at several early-stage biotech companies and co-founded a company developing new small-molecule drugs for ocular diseases.

Matthew has published numerous manuscripts in highly regarded journals, including Science, Journal of the American Chemical Society and The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and he is an inventor on one issued US patent.