Mr. Blackburn was most recently the Vice President & Chief Patent Counsel of Chiron Corporation (now Novartis Vaccines & Chiron Diagnostics ).  He started and built Chiron’s intellectual property department.  Through an integrated worldwide program of filings, licensing, partnerships and litigation, Chiron’s IP estate grew to a nearly $300 million dollar a year business unit, with an overall cumulative value in the billions of dollars. During his tenure at Chiron, the American Lawyer named Mr. Blackburn one of the top forty-five in-house counsel under the age of forty-five.

Few attorneys have Mr.Blackburn’s experience in the coordinated development of global IP rights. He has successfully implemented procurement, licensing and litigation strategies spanning four continents and worked with a wide range of technologies, including small molecules, rDNA, monoclonal antibodies, food and agricultural technologies, vaccines, diagnostics, drug screening, genomics, and arrays.

Mr. Blackburn's career has ranged from drafting some of the earliest biotech patents, such as the stem cell monoclonal antibody patent upheld in the U.S. Federal Circuit's Johns Hopkins v. CellPro decision, to successfully arguing the In re Bell case in the Federal Circuit (changing the USPTO’s obviousness standard for new genes). Mr. Blackburn has litigated patents in the U.S., U.K., Dutch, Belgian, German, Italian, French, Japanese and Australian courts, including the first biotechnology patent upheld by the UK appellate courts and some of the earliest and broadest pan-European injunctions granted by the Dutch courts.He has been in numerous patent office oppositions from Munich to Tokyo.

Mr. Blackburn has also been a Distinguished Scholar at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, and is a member of the adjunct faculty of the U.C. Berkeley School of Law.  He was a member of the National Research Council’s Committee on Intellectual Property Rights in a Knowledge-Based Economy, which released the acclaimed report entitled “A Patent System for the 21st Century,” which is a basis for current patent reform legislation.  Mr. Blackburn is a past chairperson of the Intellectual Property Law Committee of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) and a past board member of the Biotechnology Institute.  On behalf of BIO and other industry coalitions, he has been involved in legislative and policy matters, including the Biotechnology Process Patent Act, the GATT/TRIPS implementing legislation, the American Inventors Protection Act of 1999, and several amicus briefings of the Federal Circuit and the Supreme Court. Mr. Blackburn is also a member of the Board of Advisors of Inflexion Point Strategy LLC , an intellectual property investment bank. 

Prior to joining Chiron, Mr. Blackburn was a partner in the Silicon Valley office of Irell & Manella and an associate in its predecessor firm, Ciotti & Murashige, Menlo Park, California; Assistant Patent Counsel of Agrigenetics Research Corporation, Boulder, Colorado; and an associate in the law firm of Banner, Birch, McKie & Beckett (now Banner & Witcoff) in Washington, D.C. He received his J.D. from the American University, where he was Articles Editor of the Law Review, and his B.S. in chemistry with honors from Case Western Reserve University.