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UCLA to receive $520M for selling rights to cancer drug

By Alejandra Reyes-Velarde

March 4, 2016 2:06 p.m.

The original version of this article incorrectly stated that Xtandi brought more than $33,000 in 2014. In fact, they brought in $33 million.

UCLA will receive $520 million for selling the rights to a prostate cancer medication that campus researchers helped create, officials announced Friday.

The deal granted the royalty rights for Xtandi, a prostate cancer drug, to Royalty Pharma, a pharmaceutical investment company. Royalty Pharma paid a total of $1.14 billion for the royalty rights, $520 million of which will go to UCLA’s general endowment pool and the inventors who helped create the drug.

UCLA will draw $60 million over a 12-year period from the endowment pool to support research, faculty and students financial aid packages, said Steve Olsen, a vice chancellor and chief financial officer.

Olsen added the university is still determining exactly how those programs will be structured and what the benefits will be.

The rest of the profit was given to Medivation, Inc., the biopharmaceutical investment company Xtandi was licensed to in 2005.

Xtandi is one of the UC’s most profitable inventions, bringing in more than $33 million in 2014, said UCLA spokesman Ricardo Vazquez.

Prostate cancer is among the most common types of cancer for men, according to the American Cancer Society. One in seven men is diagnosed during his lifetime, and more than 27,000 men were expected to have died from prostate cancer in 2015.

Hundreds of UCLA inventions are patented, and drugs and products that come from UCLA researchers are often licensed to private companies that are responsible for selling the product in the market. UCLA licensed Xtandi to Medivation in 2005 and it has since paid UCLA a royalty amount of 4 percent of its sales in royalties.

Olsen said UCLA decided to sell the royalty rights, despite receiving a steady income, because officials were uncertain how successful sales would be in the future. He added future prostate cancer treatments could affect sales.

UCLA was also facing a lawsuit by Medivation, Olsen said. UCLA researchers created several compounds for prostate cancer treatment – the Xtandi compound was licensed to Medivation, but UCLA licensed another series of compounds to Aragon Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Medivation claimed it held the rights to those compounds as well.

Olsen said this transaction is the first of its size at UCLA, but UCLA aims to increase the amount of inventions it commercializes.

In September 2014, UCLA established Westwood Technology Transfer, a nonprofit company that will assist UCLA in identifying inventions that have commercial potential.

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Alejandra Reyes-Velarde | News editor
Reyes is the Daily Bruin's News editor and an Editorial Board member. Previously, she was the Science & Health editor covering research, the UCLA health system and graduate school news. She also writes Arts & Entertainment stories and photographs for the Bruin.
Reyes is the Daily Bruin's News editor and an Editorial Board member. Previously, she was the Science & Health editor covering research, the UCLA health system and graduate school news. She also writes Arts & Entertainment stories and photographs for the Bruin.
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