University settles lawsuit it filed against UMKC prof it accused of research theft
A confidential settlement has ended the nearly two-year-old lawsuit the University of Missouri system brought against a former UMKC pharmacy professor who the school alleged had stolen a student’s research and sold it to a pharmaceutical company without the university’s permission or benefit.
That research helped lead to the development of a drug treatment for a condition known as dry eye and could be very profitable over time.
The university had alleged that the patents for the drug belonged to the school, not professor Ashim Mitra or his student. The suit claimed that Mitra improperly received $1.5 million from the sale and had the potential of earning $10 million more in royalties from what the university said could be a billion-dollar drug.
Other defendants included companies that were party to the sale and the company marketing the drug known as Cequa.
In a news release issued Monday, the university said it had resolved its claims regarding “Mitra’s interest in the patents confidentially and to its satisfaction.”
The release went on to to say that “the university has withdrawn and dismissed its claims regarding inventorship and acknowledges the inventors are properly named and that no additional parties should be included as inventors on the patents or patent applications.”
Terms of the settlement were not disclosed. A university spokesman declined to discuss whether money changed hands or how much.
Mitra’s attorney, Arthur Chaykin, said he could not comment on details of the agreement, but said “we’re pleased with the settlement.”
The university had claimed in its lawsuit that the sales proceeds and any royalties belonged to the school because the student who developed a new and more effective way to deliver drugs to the eye — through nanotechnology — did so while employed as a graduate research assistant at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
That former student, Kishore Cholkar, was among those that The Kansas City Star quoted in a 2018 article concerning allegations that Mitra exploited foreign graduate students during his quarter century as head of the pharmaceutical sciences division at UMKC’s pharmacy school.
The students, all of them from India, said they believed Mitra might strip them of their visas if they did not agree to perform menial tasks at Mitra’s home, such as mucking out a wet basement and serving guests at social gatherings. Cholkar said he witnessed the behavior but was not among those who did such work.
However, he told The Star at the time that he felt abused in other ways. He’d worked with Mitra for several years on a research project, he said, but got no credit when the project headed toward market.
“That was my product, I worked day and night and yet my name was not included,” Cholkar said. “I was the only student who worked on that product. I put all my efforts into that product. I was cheated.”
Cholkar was among the students the university contacted at the time as part of the school’s continuing investigation into Mitra’s behavior. Mitra resigned in 2019 without acknowledging wrongdoing.
At the time the lawsuit was filed, Mitra called the allegations “unexpected and disappointing” and said that he and his wife, Ranjana, who was also named in the suit, had done nothing wrong.
“All of the alleged wrongdoing on the part of myself and my wife can be proven to be false,” he said.
The university said in court documents that Mitra sold Cholkar’s research to Auven Therapeutics Management, a pharmaceutical development company based in the U.S. Virgin Islands, which resold the invention to a company in India called Sun Pharmaceutical Industries for $40 million, plus royalties.
In Monday’s news release, the university said it now acknowledges that “all of the patents and intellectual property rights involved in the action are fully owned by the Sun Pharma group and relate to its Cequa ophthalmic product, approved as a treatment for dry eye.”
Sun Pharma announced its launch of the product in October 2019.
This story was originally published December 28, 2020 at 5:06 PM.
