Kite Phar­ma's ex-CEO con­tra­dicts founder as CAR-T patent tri­al heats up, with con­flict­ing val­u­a­tions

Two days af­ter Kite Phar­ma founder Arie Bellde­grun told a fed­er­al court­room that a meet­ing he had with a Memo­r­i­al Sloan Ket­ter­ing ex­ec­u­tive wasn’t about li­cens­ing their im­munother­a­py patent, Kite’s ex-CEO Aya Jakobovits said it was.

The ad­mis­sion came Tues­day dur­ing cross-ex­am­i­na­tion in a patent in­fringe­ment case that fea­tures two of the biggest can­cer biotechs and some of the most well-known names in Amer­i­can med­i­cine.

Jakobovits ini­tial­ly said she was not in at­ten­dance, didn’t know it was go­ing to hap­pen and didn’t know what took place, ac­cord­ing to Law360. But then the plain­tiff’s lawyer hand­ed her a doc­u­ment – whose con­tents were not pub­licly re­vealed – and asked again if she learned af­ter-the-fact that the meet­ing in­volved a po­ten­tial patent li­cense.

“Yes,” Jakobovits even­tu­al­ly said.

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