A pharmaceutical industry giant is seeking to join Penn in a lawsuit against St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital over research that has the potential to cure cancer.
Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation filed a motion on Wednesday to intervene in Penn’s ongoing dispute with St. Jude over patent no. 8,399,645, a patent St. Jude was granted in March 2013 for a type of cancer treatment technology.
Novartis entered into a partnership with Penn in August 2012, receiving the rights to similar cancer treatment technology developed by the research team of Penn professor Carl June. The goal of the partnership is to turn June’s treatment method into an FDA-approved drug product.
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As part of the deal, the Swiss company agreed to give the University $20 million as a contribution to the construction of Penn’s Center for Advanced Cellular Therapies.
The drug product that Novartis is developing, known as CTL019, is currently being tested in clinical trials.
“We have joined the University of Pennsylvania in this litigation to protect our ability to advance the CTL019 program,” Novartis spokeswoman Julie Masow said in a statement. She added that Novartis is “immensely proud” to be working with June and Penn researchers, and that the “clinical trials to date” have shown that CTL019 has “the potential” to treat two different forms of leukemia.
June’s work is at the center of the continuing lawsuit between Penn and St. Jude. In the current suit — which is a consolidation of three court actions that the parties have filed over the past two years — the University is requesting a judgment declaring that Penn has not infringed upon St. Jude’s patent for cancer treatment technology created by a scientist who previously partnered with June.
Dario Campana, one of two St. Jude researchers credited with inventing the patented technology, maintained a research partnership with June in the early 2000s. As part of their collaboration, June was privy to a cancer treatment construct that Campana created.
In a July 2012 complaint, St. Jude alleged that Penn broke the terms of two materials transfer agreements relating to the exchange of technologies between Campana and June. St. Jude contended that Penn violated the agreement by seeking to commercialize the technology and failing to properly credit St. Jude personnel in a paper that June published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
In response to these allegations, the University filed a complaint later that month claiming that St. Jude “interfered with the University’s prospective contractual relations.” The University also sought a judgment affirming that Penn did not breach the materials transfer agreements.
A few days after St. Jude obtained the patent for Campana’s treatment method in March 2013, the University filed the complaint that has materialized into the present lawsuit regarding Penn’s non-infringement of the patent and its invalidation.
Gary Stephenson, a spokesperson for St. Jude, said in a statement that while the hospital does not normally comment on ongoing litigation, it is “disappointed that the University of Pennsylvania has refused to honor contractual agreements.” He said that one of St. Jude’s “key goal[s]” is to “ensure that promising discoveries get turned into treatments or diagnostics that benefit patients worldwide.”
He added that St. Jude took on the litigation because the organization is “obligated to safeguard [its] reputation on behalf of our many donors, researchers, physicians, employees and, most of all, our patients and their families.”
Susan Phillips, a spokesperson for Penn Medicine, said in a statement that while Penn Medicine doesn’t normally comment on active cases, she wanted “to emphasize that this litigation in no way distracts from Penn’s ongoing research and clinical efforts in using T-cell therapies for patients with blood cancers.”
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Novartis is the second company to intervene in the lawsuit. Juno Therapeutics Inc., a biotechnology firm, joined St. Jude in the suit in December 2013. Juno became involved in the case after St. Jude licensed the Seattle-based company the right to commercialize the patented technology.
Juno officials could not be reached for comment.
The fact that Novartis is taking action in the lawsuit is not unusual given the situation. Lee Petherbridge, a professor at Loyola Law School and 2002 Penn Law graduate, explained that universities often partner with companies or license their research to companies because “the universities themselves are usually not in the position to develop new technologies and fully carry through with marketing.”
If the technology proves to be successful, it “could have a broad impact on the way that people receive cancer treatments,” Petherbridge said.
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