Sectors

Pharma and Life Sciences

Our expertise:

McCann FitzGerald is one of the most active advisers to companies across the pharma and life sciences sector, and we have developed a deep understanding of the multifaceted issues that they face. Our team includes corporate, competition and regulatory, dispute resolution and intellectual property lawyers and lawyers with scientific backgrounds and experience.

Our clients range from investors, start-up companies and large and medium-sized organisations to universities, research institutions and emerging life sciences ventures. We advise them on financings, licensings, acquisitions and strategic alliances, and we have counselled some of the sector’s largest companies on major competition investigations and challenges, patent litigation and other commercial disputes.

Key areas:

• Establishment in Ireland, including tax structuring
• Intellectual property ownership, licensing, assignment and technology transfer agreements
• Intellectual property protection, registration and disputes
• Collaborative research and development arrangements
• Distribution arrangements
• Regulatory issues related to the manufacture, marketing and sale of products, including labelling, advertising, wholesaling, generic imports and pricing
• The regulations of the Health Products Regulatory Authority and other regulatory bodies
• Product liability
• Venture capital and private equity
• Mergers and acquisitions, restructurings and joint ventures
• Employment and HR
• Insurance
• Competition law issues

Key highlights include advising:

• Boston Scientific on a range of corporate transactions over many years and on all employment, equality law and industrial relations issues arising regarding its employees (circa 4,500) in Ireland at three manufacturing plants
• GSK (GlaxoSmithKline), on a broad range of work including IP and product liability matters and claims as well as regulatory and commercial arrangements including distribution agreements
• Inflection Biosciences on intellectual property ownership, licensing, development, exploitation, and protection measures/strategies in connection with its review and development of patents and related IP in the field of oncology 
• Maynooth University on the protection, exploitation and licensing of intellectual property developed in the University, including patents, copyright, trademarks and rights in confidential information
• Pfizer over many years on a range of challenging and complex matters particularly in the corporate and regulatory sectors.  We advised them on a number of pharmaceutical regulatory matters including issues relating to Marketing Authorisations and representation of Pfizer before the European Patent Office. We have also acted for Pfizer in Irish patent litigation
• Science Foundation Ireland on a complicated suite of agreements relating to a collaboration with Pfizer for the funding of research and development projects within Irish universities