Ono Pharmaceutical Co. said Friday it has agreed to pay 5 billion yen ($44 million) to Japanese Nobel laureate in medicine Tasuku Honjo and donate 23 billion yen to a research fund at his university to settle a lawsuit on cancer drug patent royalties.
The settlement, reached at the Osaka District Court, resolves the suit in which Honjo, a distinguished professor at Kyoto University and 2018 Nobel Prize winner, had sought about 26.2 billion yen in patent royalties from the company that sells the cancer treatment drug Opdivo, developed based on discoveries by his research team.
"We were able to reach a settlement I feel satisfied with. I would like to support fundamental research with the funds that we will get back from the company," Honjo said through his lawyer.
According to the settlement terms, moving forward, the company will pay royalties of 1 percent or less to Honjo as per their initial contract.
In a news conference Friday, Ono Pharmaceutical President Gyo Sagara also welcomed the settlement, which he said "fully resolved" issues between the company and Honjo.
In the complaint, Honjo said he signed a contract with Ono Pharmaceutical in 2006 outlining how revenue would be split between the two. However, in 2011 the scientist sought to renegotiate the original deal's terms, saying the rate was unfair.
The complaint also says that in 2014 Ono Pharmaceutical's Sagara made a verbal proposal to pay Honjo 40 percent of patent royalties due from U.S. pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. Inc. if he cooperated on a patent lawsuit between the two companies.
Honjo agreed to help the Japanese drugmaker, but the company broke its promise to him, only paying 1 percent of the royalties after the two firms reached an out-of-court settlement, the complaint said.
The discovery of the protein PD-1 by Honjo and his team in 1992 later led to the development of the drug Opdivo that triggers the immune system to attack cancer cells. Ono Pharmaceutical started selling it in 2014, and it is usually used to treat skin and lung cancer.
