Seat­tle and Dai­ichi Sankyo at each oth­er's throats; UC Berke­ley, UCSF and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton launch Weill Neu­ro­hub

→ Seat­tle Ge­net­ics and Dai­ichi Sankyo — once part­ners — are now bit­ter foes bat­tling over in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty un­der­pin­ning ADC tech­nol­o­gy. Af­ter go­ing their sep­a­rate ways, ear­li­er this year Dai­ichi en­tered in­to a mul­ti-bil­lion dol­lar pact with As­traZeneca, which gave the British drug­mak­er the li­cense to a HER2 an­ti­body de­vel­oped for use in gas­tric and breast can­cers. Seat­tle Ge­net­ics has claimed that the drug in ques­tion has been en­gi­neered us­ing an im­proved ver­sion of its tech­nol­o­gy, while Dai­ichi has cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly de­nied that claim, say­ing the drug has lit­tle to do with tech they worked on as part­ners. The two sides were locked in dis­pute res­o­lu­tion pro­ceed­ings with­out the in­volve­ment of the courts, but Dai­ichi filed a law­suit last week al­leg­ing that Seat­tle had made a “mer­it­less” claim to the in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty. On Tues­day, Seat­tle said it had re­tal­i­at­ed with an ar­bi­tra­tion de­mand to the Amer­i­can Ar­bi­tra­tion As­so­ci­a­tion to re­solve the sit­u­a­tion.

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