On December 20, 2019, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) filed a request to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that it investigate an apparent failure to disclose federal funding in patents associated with cancer immunotherapies Opdivo and Keytruda. A court case concluded this year ordered Dr. Gordon Freeman and Dr. Clive Wood to be added to six patents related to PD-1/PD-L1 pathways, which are foundational patents for the cancer immunotherapy treatment. Dr. Freeman’s research benefited from several NIH grants, as is acknowledged in the papers that were key evidence in the court case that resulted in him being added to the patents as inventor.
KEI has asked the NIH to investigate this failure to disclose, as well as for information regarding our outstanding previous requests regarding failures to disclose on other inventions.
For more on KEI’s work on non-disclosure of federal funding in medical technology patents, please see: https://www.keionline.org/bayh-dole/failure-to-disclose
A PDF version of the request is available here.