A leading cancer center on Friday prevailed in a lawsuit seeking to add its researcher’s name to patents for a form of cancer immunotherapy, a decision that will allow it to license the intellectual property behind the patents to companies developing new therapies.
A U.S. District Court judge ruled in favor of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute on all six counts on which it was challenging the patents, which underlie the blockbuster cancer drug Opdivo.
The bench trial in Boston traced the history of a scientific collaboration between Tasuku Honjo of Japan, who shared the Nobel Prize in medicine for the work; Clive Wood, formerly of the Genetics Institute in Cambridge, Mass.; and Gordon Freeman of Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber. That relationship later soured, but testimony and documents dating from 1998 convinced Chief Judge Patti Saris that all three scientists made significant contributions to understanding how cancer tricks the immune system and how a new class of drugs — later called checkpoint inhibitors — might overcome it.
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