Underscoring the intense competition to find more effective treatments for cancer, Abbott Laboratories has sued world-renowned cancer researcher Dr. Judah Folkman, accusing him of stealing the credit for an experimental drug that prevents blood vessel cells from reproducing and that someday may be used to starve tumors in cancer patients.
The suit claims Folkman and Children’s Hospital in Boston, where Folkman runs a large laboratory, fraudulently told U.S. patent examiners that their researchers had discovered that a protein known as Kringle 5 inhibits the growth of blood-vessel cells.
The patent was awarded to Children’s Hospital in 1998, which has since licensed the rights to Kringle 5 to EntreMed Inc. of Rockville, Md.
But Abbott officials say Kringle 5’s vessel-inhibiting properties were discovered at its own North Chicago lab by a much lesser-known researcher.
According to Abbott’s complaint, which seeks $10 million in damages, Abbott scientist Donald Davidson made the Kringle 5 discovery. Folkman and Children’s Hospital, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, unlawfully misappropriated his work, the suit says.
Children’s Hospital dismissed Abbott’s assertions as “irresponsible charges,” asserting that the complaint “contains false, misleading and inaccurate information. Our attorneys fully expect that Children’s will prevail in all aspects of this case in court.”
Folkman said in a prepared statement that “the dispute comes down to Children’s Hospital wanting to protect its patent rights and Abbott wanting to avoid paying any royalties.”
Filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Boston, the lawsuit doesn’t affect any of the current clinical trials aimed at putting Folkman’s other promising discoveries into practice. Yet it reflects how the billions of dollars at stake in developing blockbuster new drugs can pit researcher against researcher, raising questions about scientific integrity that were once rarely aired in public forums.
Central to the dispute is one of the most highly touted anti-cancer breakthroughs in years. Known as angiogenesis inhibitors, the prospective drugs are thought to be able to halt the growth of new blood vessels that malignant tumors need to survive and grow.
More Top Picks Deep Fryers
Drug makers and Wall Street are especially excited about the research and the potential for a profit windfall should the clinical trials pan out.
“While most of these projects are in very early-stage development, there is hope that there will be a real breakthrough in cancer therapy,” said pharmaceutical and health-care services analyst Sarah Ross of Edward Jones in St. Louis.
“There is a lot of research going on in that area of cancer therapy and a lot of excitement about angiogenesis inhibitors. I would say that’s the driver in this [suit], given the enthusiasm for angiogenesis inhibitors now.”
Two San Francisco companies, Sugen and Genentech, reported last week that their own angiogenesis inhibitors, when combined with standard chemotherapy, shrank tumors in about 40 percent of a few dozen patients with advanced cancers. Further testing is required to learn whether those drugs and others like them will benefit larger numbers of patients.
A number of laboratories in this country and Europe have reported that Kringle 5 halts the reproduction of blood vessel cells in the test tube. Kringle 5 hasn’t been tested in humans.
Abbott claims that Folkman and a researcher in his lab, Dr. Michael O’Reilly, didn’t claim Kringle 5 when they reported in 1994 their discovery that blood proteins containing Kringles 1 through 4 slowed the growth of tumors in mice. Kringles, actually protein loops formed of chained amino acids, are so named because of a vague resemblance to the Danish pastry of the same name.
Abbott further maintains that Kringle 5’s promising properties were discovered by Davidson the following year and subsequently confirmed by Folkman’s research team. Only after that, Abbott says, did Children’s Hospital file its own patent claim for the discovery of Kringle 5.
A high-profile lawsuit like this one is hardly emblematic of the corporate culture for which Abbott has become known, analysts say.
Abbott is a conservative, $13 billion-a-year maker of drugs and hospital products that isn’t known for boasting about its research or its financial performance.
“Abbott has thoroughly investigated this issue and engaged in extensive discussion with the defendants to settle this matter,” said Cathy Babington, Abbott vice president of public affairs. “Abbott is confident in its position and will vigorously defend its rights to the intellectual property at stake.”
Folkman, who is named along with O’Reilly as an inventor on the disputed Kringle 5 patent, asserted that he had “no personal interest in this matter and hopes that Kringle 5 continues to test well and progresses from the laboratory to further stages of development so that it can eventually benefit patients.”
Folkman became a worldwide media celebrity two years ago when the New York Times quoted the Nobel laureate James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, as predicting that Folkman would “cure cancer in two years.” Watson later said he could not recall having made such a prediction but called Folkman’s work “the most exciting cancer research of my lifetime.”