Hojung Cho, Ph.D.

Hojung Cho, Ph.D. is counsel in Sterne Kessler’s Biotechnology & Chemical Practice Group. She primarily counsels her clients in developing and managing complex, worldwide patent portfolios and strategic counseling on IP risk mitigation and aligning IP strategies with business and commercialization objectives. She conducts landscape and freedom-to-operate (FTO) analysis, invalidity opinions, and pre-litigation analysis, and assists clients in due diligence for IP licensing and acquisition.

Hojung’s technical experience covers a wide range of subject matter, including large and small molecule therapeutics, and related processes, formulations, methods of use, including therapeutic antibodies, antibody-drug conjugates, bispecific or multispecific antibodies, chimeric antigen receptors, T cell receptors, therapeutic oligonucleotides, gene editing, gene therapy, cell therapy, immunotherapy, vaccines, drug delivery, lipid nanoparticles, AI-driven drug discovery and design, in situ spatial biology, in situ transcriptomics, multiplexed single cell analysis, microbiome therapy; cell culture platform, cell cryopreservation, tissue engineering, stem cells, antibiotic treatment, infectious diseases, metabolic engineering, biofuels, biosensors, nanoparticles, biomaterials, polymers, catalysts, and programmed therapeutic or diagnostic devices. Hojung has a particular interest in advising clients on multidisciplinary inventions.

Before joining the firm, Hojung worked at an international IP law firm as an associate, where she gained substantive experience in PTAB IPR proceedings and U.S. district court litigation in patent and trade secret matters. She also worked at an IP boutique firm as counsel focusing on biotech prosecution and counseling.

Before entering patent law practice, Hojung received her Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where her research involved recombinant protein expression to study bacterial environmental sensing and gene regulation in a microfluidic platform. Numerous press reports (including Nature, Nature Reviews Microbiology, and MSNBC) highlighted her work as significant for investigating biofilm formation and infectious diseases. While earning her bachelor’s degree at Seoul National University, Hojung conducted research on developing bacterial enzyme systems for amino acid production.

Selected Publications

• Co-author, Spotlight on Claim Construction before PTAB, 11 Buff. Intell. Prop. L.J. 73 (2015)
• Co-author, Self-Induced Mechanical Stress Can Trigger Biofilm Formation in Uropathogenic Escherichia Coli, Nature Communications, 9:4087 (2018)
• Co-author, Self-Organization in High-Density Bacterial Colonies: Efficient Crowd Control, PLoS Biol. (2007); 5 (11): e302 (highlighted in Nature 450, 322-323 (2007); Nature Reviews Microbiology 5, 904 (2007))
• Co-author, A microfluidic chemostat for experiments with bacterial and yeast cells, Nature Methods 2(9): 685-9 (2005)