The article cowritten by Dr. Craig B. Thompson in the scientific journal Cancer Cell pointed to a promising approach to fighting cancer. By targeting metabolic enzymes, he suggested, it might be possible to alter cancer pathways and starve tumors of nutrients.
Thompson’s piece didn’t just capture the attention of scientists. Officials at the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked as director of the Leonard and Madlyn Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute, also took notice. They wondered if Thompson’s breakthrough research could lead to patents that would give the school a lucrative source of revenue.
One of those officials, Robert H. Schenkel, sent Thompson an e-mail in February 2010, asking to talk about such a possibility. But when Schenkel and two associates from Penn’s technology transfer office met with him a couple weeks later, they were surprised. Thompson downplayed the significance of the article, and an earlier one he wrote for the journal Nature, insisting the findings weren’t worthy of being patented, they later recalled.
The suit alleges that Thompson, now president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, essentially stole discoveries made at Penn to start his company, Agios Pharmaceuticals Inc. Penn said that as a condition of employment, he had agreed to give the university right of first refusal for any discoveries that came out of school labs.
The case, which pits an elite university against the leader of one of the nation’s most prestigious cancer hospitals, highlights the heated competition for control over groundbreaking biomedical discoveries that can win inventors bragging rights and shower their sponsors with rich licensing fees.
I thought this was about taking care of sick people.
It centers on the activity of Agios, a low-profile company tucked in the warren of buildings behind the Massachusetts Institute of Technology....
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