Nobel winner Honjo, pharmaceutical company in dispute over license fee

They probably gave him 10,000 yen and a photo of the shacko as his reward.

This is not good for the future of japan. If you put your life into a project and get ripped of by companies, what is the incentive to make cutting edge inventions?

Corporate greed!

@jpn_guy

The university owns the intellectual property for the invention. They then licensed the patent(s) to Ono Pharma. The terms of the license, such as royalties, should have been clearly spelled out at the time. If not, then the lawyers for the university did not do their job.

It's common for disputes like this to happen when the company develops new patents and these dilute the value of the original invention, but I don't think that happened here.

"increasing my remuneration in line with (the drug's) sales" does not sound like good legal basis for a dispute.

I will say this. In my opinion, Kyoto Univ. does not have a good track record in dealing with Univ. startups. Univ. Tokyo and Osaka Univ. seem to be much better at this...

Still, since Honjo-sensei is so powerful, I think Ono will end up contributing to his foundation. But I doubt they will redo their legal contract... That's my guess.

Kyoto University is public funded. In other words, the original research that led to this breakthrough was funded by Japanese tax payers.

Not quite.

"Before the development of Opdivo, cancer immunotherapy was "in the dark," according to an industry source. But Ono Pharmaceutical, a mid-size drugmaker with 100 billion yen in sales at the time, bet tens of billions of yen on drug's development. That is a massive gamble for the company, which had no experience with other cancer medications."

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Nobel-laureate-demands-higher-cancer-drug-royalties-from-Ono-Pharma

They probably gave him 10,000 yen and a photo of the shacko as his reward.

From the article:

"he refused to accept the company's offer of about 2.6 billion yen"

There are good companies (I've heard) and bad companies. There are good people and bad people. Let them sort it out.