Seattle-based cancer research startup Juno Therapeutics today reached a settlement with Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp. over a three-year patent dispute.
The original lawsuit was brought forward in 2012, when St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the University of Pennsylvania sued Novartis over a patent dispute related to cancer immunotherapy drugs. Juno entered the litigation in December 2013 after it signed a licensing agreement with St. Jude’s.
The settlement orders Novartis to pay Juno $12.25 million up front and award the company with future milestone payments. Juno will also receive a mid-single-digit royalty on U.S. sales of products related to the patent claims, and a low double-digit percentage of the royalties that Novartis pays to Penn for sales of those products.
“We are pleased by this settlement, which benefits patients by allowing each party to advance its promising cancer immunotherapies and rewards the investigators on whose insights those developments are based,” Juno CEO Hans Bishop said in a statement.
Both Novartis and Juno are working on biotechnology that takes a cancer patient’s T-cells, a key part of the immune system, and reprograms them using genetic engineering to fight that person’s cancer. The approach promises an alternative to radiation and chemotherapy for cancer patients.
Juno went public back in December after raising $314 million in venture funding from Arch Venture Partners, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and others. It initially raised $264 million in the IPO and the company’s stock shot up by 45 percent on the first day on NASDAQ. Shares are now trading at $57 per share after reaching a high of $61 per share in January.
Juno, which employs 123 and was founded just two years ago, spun out of research from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Seattle Children’s Research Institute. In February it announced plans for a manufacturing facility in Bothell and is currently looking for a new office in Seattle.
