Researchers lose battle over patent

by Sundeep Malladi

Monday, November 22, 2004 00:00

University of New Mexico researchers Galen D. Knight and Terence J. Scallen have lost the final round in a set of cases involving the ownership of a potential cancer cure. While this last bout of legal squabbling occurred just recently, the case stretches back as far as 1991.

In 1991, Knight, a biochemist and former research associate, and Terence Scallen, professor emeritus of biochemistry and molecular biology, assigned the university the rights to a set of chemical compounds that doctors could use to treat cancer.

“These agents not only have implications for cancer,” Scallen said, “but they also have implications for infectious disease, the ability of vaccines to function properly. They have very wide implications from the standpoint of medical therapy.”

Three years later, the university patented and licensed the compounds to Dovetail Technologies, a biopharmaceutical development company. However, the compounds had been altered, and the two researchers refused to sign documents to update the patent record in 1996, according to Scallen.

“They changed them to compounds we never used,” Scallen said. “We took the position … ‘these are no longer our inventions’ because the compounds we actually used were deleted from the patents and applications.”

The University of New Mexico disagreed with the researchers.

“[The case] clarifies that the university is the owner of the invention, and some technical things about how the chemical and chemical compounds are described,” the university’s counsel emeritus Nick Estes said.

Scallen and Knight defended themselves without lawyers throughout the trials. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the university has had to pay more than $500,000 in legal costs.

Through the haze of legal battle, Scallen said he fears some have lost sight of a greater issue — that of saving lives through medical breakthroughs.

“It’s so sad for cancer patients. These compounds were ready to go into the clinic in 1994,” Scallen said. “I’m simply sick and tired of my friends and neighbors and family members dying of cancer, and I’m just not going to stop. I’m going to keep until I get these compounds into the clinics whether the university likes it or not.”

According to the American Cancer Society, cancer is the second leading cause of the death in the United States and causes one in every four deaths.

Scallen said he takes these figures to heart.

“One neighbor died about two years ago of the very disease we said we could cure, melanoma, and [our invention] had a 70 percent lifetime cure rate,” he said.

Estes said he has faith in the court’s decision.

“I think people in a democratic society can disagree with what courts do in a particular case,” Estes said. “I think all of us have seen court decisions we’ve thought were wrong, but you still have to abide by those decisions and just move forward with life.”

According to Scallen, the researchers’ original invention has been left to sit on shelves, and the compounds are no longer in their original state.

“These weren’t our inventions anymore,” he said. “It would have been scientifically, ethically and morally wrong for us to assign those assignments, because those weren’t the compounds we used.”

However, Estes sees no reason why the compounds will not soon reach the market. “There’s no reason to think that if these drugs are safe and effective, it won’t reach the marketplace as soon as possible,” he said.