Matthew Warren

Bristows

When lockdown hit, Bristows partner Matthew Warren thought work in his commercial IP practice would dry up. Instead, it became the busiest time of his life. The partner advised Oxford University on the agreement with pharma company AstraZeneca for the development of a vaccine against Covid-19.

The son of a patent attorney and a physics graduate, early in his career he was among the scientists and engineers hired and trained by Bristows to deal with increasingly technical mandates. That paved Warren’s path towards a peak of transactional work in the life sciences sector, advising on an experimental Alzheimer’s disease treatment in the 1990s and, years later, on former prime minister David Cameron’s genomes sequencing project to identify treatments for rare diseases.

It was this reputation that led to a call for help from Oxford University on its negotiations with AstraZeneca. When the university called, he had to act quickly. A rather large question lay before him: how do you vaccinate the world? It was Warren’s task to dissect each detail, from manufacturing technicalities to managing international issues. Due to the urgency of the matter, everything needed to be done in parallel. The fact that the vaccine would be distributed on a not-for-profit basis also entailed an unusual set of licensing circumstances.

Warren’s pandemic efforts further include ongoing advice on a testing consortium involving AstraZeneca and Cambridge University.