Patent win gives Mass. Eye and Ear windfall
Clinic receives $126m related to drug development
After a nine-year legal battle, the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary has received a patent-dispute payment that amounts to well over half of its annual patient revenue, the Boston hospital said yesterday. The money will fund new research and educational programs.
QLT Inc., a Canadian maker of eye-disease treatments, has made a lump-sum payment of $126 million to the Boston hospital to resolve a disagreement over who deserved credit for developing Visudyne, the first drug treatment for age-related macular degeneration.
The drug makes abnormal blood vessels in the eye sensitive to photodynamic therapy, a treatment using laser light to destroy those abnormal vessels while sparing the retina.
Macular degeneration damages the center of a person’s visual field, making it the leading cause of vision loss in people over 50 in the developed world.
Dr. Joan W. Miller and Dr. Evangelos Gragoudas developed the therapy in research labs at Mass. Eye and Ear in the 1990s. At the time, a dye made by QLT was being tested in clinical trials to be used with photodynamic therapy as a treatment for cancer.
The Mass. Eye and Ear doctors thought it might work against macular degeneration and began testing it in patients in 1995. The Food and Drug Administration approved the drug in 2000.
That same year, Mass. Eye and Ear sued QLT, opposing patents QLT had filed on Visudyne because they included other people as inventors in addition to Mass. Eye and Ear researchers, contrary to an earlier agreement. In 2006 a jury returned a verdict in favor of Mass. Eye and Ear, ordering QLT to pay Mass. Eye and Ear royalties of 3 percent as long as Visudyne is sold.
After a series of appeals, the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in January upheld a lower court’s ruling that QLT had engaged in unfair trade practices. QLT did not appeal the decision and considers the matter closed, president and chief executive Bob Butchofsky said yesterday.
Mass. Eye and Ear is still deciding how to use the $126 million it has received, said Miller, who is chief of ophthalmology at the hospital and chair of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School. Mass. Eye and Ear projects it will have $174 million in net patient revenue for fiscal 2009; its endowment is worth about $80 million.
“However you slice it, it is a big number. I think it’s a testament to hanging in there,’’ she said. “I think we always felt excited and proud to have developed a treatment for patients. That’s always the goal, but I think this is really an exciting opportunity to invest and build some great programs that will educate the next generation and really forge ahead on important research.’’
Future royalty payments will hinge on sales of Visudyne, which totaled $142 million last year. Other treatments for macular degeneration have emerged since Visudyne was introduced, including drugs such as Avastin - also used to treat cancer - and Lucentis. Injected into the eye, the drugs target growth factors that stimulate blood vessel growth. Miller was involved in early research on Lucentis.
