Patent-Infringement Windfall Goes to Israeli Institution, Could Be a Result of the Weizmann Top Scientists, Officials Gambling

Two companies involved in the making and selling of the anticancer drug Erbitux will each pay $60-million to the technology-transfer organization of Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, resolving claims from a patent dispute.

The settlement, announced on Friday by ImClone Systems Inc. and Sanofi-Aventis SA, acknowledges that the Weizmann organization, called the Yeda Research and Development Company, is the sole owner of the patent.

In September 2006 a federal judge in New York ruled that three scientists at Weizmann deserved the patent for inventing the process used in making Erbitux, a drug for treating colon cancer that ImClone Systems makes.

ImClone has resolved another patent-infringement lawsuit over Erbitux involving a university. In September, it agreed to pay $65-million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Repligen Corporation to settle a 2004 lawsuit that was due to go to trial that day. The parties did not say how much of the settlement would go to MIT.

Source: Goldie Blumenstyk. Patent-Infringement Windfall Goes to Israeli Institution The Chronicle of the Higher Education (10 Dec 2007) [FullText]