Patent dispute sparks federal lawsuit
Karen A. Norris, faculty member in immunology in the School of Medicine, and Heather Kling, a post-doctoral associate in immunology, are suing the University and two physicians at the Richard King Mellon Foundation Institute for Pediatric Research at Children’s Hospital in federal court.
The suit states that the two Pitt researchers “together conceived and reduced to practice a vaccine for pneumocystis,” which, although common in young people, can cause “a deadly pneumonia” in those for whom illness has caused a “weakened immune system.”
It alleges that the physicians, Jay K. Kolls and Mingkuan Zheng, “were part of a continuing and deliberate scheme to steal the plaintiffs’ data as their own” and have filed “fraudulent patent filings.”
When contacted, Norris and Kling directed calls to their attorney, James E. Beasley Jr., of Philadelphia, who did not respond to inquiries. Zheng was unavailable, while Kolls referred callers to his lawyer, Vicki Kuftic Horne of Pittsburgh, who responded to questions with a statement.
That statement references an internal Pitt inquiry in the long-running dispute that, last year, found Kolls guilty of “research impropriety” for issues surrounding record-keeping and citations of the Norris/Kling research in his own studies, but not misconduct. This conclusion prompted the lawsuit’s claim that “Pitt was conspiring with Kolls” in the battle over who had rights to a patent filing.
The statement also references the different lines of animal research each side has undertaken.
“We think the ‘Norris’ suit is without merit. The independent inquiry panel already established that the work of the Kolls lab on mini-kexin predated any involvement with Heather Kling’s thesis committee and that the Kolls lab had an independent line of investigation studying the murine sequence as a vaccine in the murine model while the Norris lab studied antibody response in monkeys.
“Without addressing whether there is any real commercial value to the patent in light of such considerations as product development cost, the sequences at the basis of the patent and existing prevention strategies for the disease, we further understand that there is nothing prohibiting the commercial development of this vaccine by the plaintiffs, if they wish to pursue that.”
Also named as defendants in the suit are Louisiana State University, where the two physicians did some of their research prior to joining Children’s Hospital, and Minivax Corp., a company created as part of their research.
—Marty Levine