van den Berg IP is proud to present our team members:
Frans van den Berg
Frans holds a doctorate in Chemistry (heterogeneous catalysis) and has worked in the patent field since 2000. He has vast experience as an inhouse patent attorney in various technological areas including the pharmaceutical, agrochemical and chemical industry. He is European, Dutch and Swiss patent attorney. Since 2008 Frans has been working in life science. In 2014 he founded van den Berg IP GmbH and is the managing director. Frans can support in all patent matters in the field of coatings, polymer chemistry, agrochemistry, seed care and seed technology, small molecules and biologicals and biotechnology.
Mike Dammann
With 30 years of in-house experience in the fields of trademarks, designs and domain names Mike completes the service offer from van den Berg IP.
After his Law studies Mike gained his first experience in the sporting goods industry (at Adidas), before he moved to Basel in 1990, where he has since been working for companies in the areas of crop protection products, seeds and ophthalmology (at Sandoz, Novartis and Syngenta).
Mikes main expertise lies in the fields of providing opinions on trademark searches, trademark filing and prosecution strategies, and trademark lifecycle management.
Henk van den Brink
Henk has over 40 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry. Starting in research he has developed new compounds using micro-organism and enzyme technology. Henk was further involved in cell culture processes in particular for the production and isolation of influenza vaccines. Following his research endeavours Henk moved to bioinformatics where he used various gene expression tools to screen and find new targets. Subsequently, Henk used his bio-informatics knowledge to become a information specialist in the patent department with a special focus on biotechnology and in particular on sequence searching.
Upon moving to Switzerland, Henk took on patent search activities in the field of generic drugs.
Henk Gerdsen
Henk worked more than 40 years at AkzoNobel and Nouryon. He started at the polymer laboratory doing research by wet chemical and instrumental methods. He also performed blood analysis.In 1984 he moved to the IP department and worked as a patent analyst till 2019.
His field of activity included polymers, chemical and pharmaceutical compounds and solar cells, performing FTO, validity, novelty and opposition searches. He has a lot of experience with chemical structure and Markush searching, using STN, Derwent and Questel.
He also participated in a number of PDG (Patent Documentation Group, founded in 1957 by 13 European chemical and oil companies) user groups and WON user groups.
His passive knowledge of languages includes English, German, French and to a lesser extent Portuguese and Japanese.