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发帖数: 914 | 1 The University of Pennsylvania has joined a lawsuit accusing the president
of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center of walking off with the fruits
of university research to start his own company.
The Sloan-Kettering president, Dr. Craig B. Thompson, was sued in December
by his former workplace, a cancer research institute located at the
University of Pennsylvania, which said Dr. Thompson had concealed his
involvement with the company.
Penn seemed to distance itself from the lawsuit, pointing out that the
institute — the Leonard and Madlyn Abramson Family Cancer Research
Institute — was a separate legal entity from the university. And people
close to Dr. Thompson pointed to the university’s noninvolvement as a sign
the accusations were without merit.
But on Wednesday, Penn filed its own complaint against Dr. Thompson in
Federal District Court in Manhattan.
The suit says Dr. Thompson violated the university’s patent policy and the
terms of his employment “by failing to disclose to the university research
and discoveries that he instead provided to a for-profit corporation and
ultimately publicly disclosed in international journal publications, both to
the detriment of the university.”
The suit also named Agios Pharmaceuticals, the biotechnology company that Dr
. Thompson helped start in 2007.
The university is expected to ask that the two complaints be consolidated
and heard together, according to a letter to the judge from David C. Burger,
the lawyer representing the Abramson research institute.
Dr. Thompson’s attorney, Allan J. Arffa, did not immediately respond to a
request for comment sent by e-mail after normal business hours on Wednesday.
On Thursday, Agios issued a statement saying taht Penn had “filed its
separate lawsuit only after Agios requested dismissal of the Abramson
Institute suit on several grounds, including that Penn, as an interested
party, was absent from that suit,” adding, “Both of these suits are
without merit and Agios believes it has done nothing wrong.’’
Universities typically control the rights to inventions made on their
campuses and see them as a potentially major source of revenues.
The Penn complaint contains details not included in the initial complaint by
the Abramson research institute. It says that Dr. Thompson was a co-author
of one scientific paper and the lead author on another related to an enzyme
called IDH1 that is a focus of Agios’s research into new ways to treat
cancer.
The suit says that before the papers were published in late 2009 and early
2010, Agios filed provisional patent applications based on the research.
After the second paper was published, Penn’s technology transfer office
told Dr. Thompson in an e-mail that the work could constitute “a
significant patentable invention.” Dr. Thomson told the technology transfer
office that there was nothing patentable in the research, even though he
already knew that Agios had begun filing for patents on the same work, the
lawsuit says.
Penn said it suffered at last $100 million in damages. The Abramson
complaint said the damages could ultimately exceed $1 billion. |
