Bloomberg Law
December 16, 2016, 9:08 PM UTC

Gilead’s Patent Loss to Merck Started With a Broken Friendship

Bloomberg Media

By Susan Decker, Caroline Chen and Christopher Yasiejko, Bloomberg News

If Gilead Sciences Inc. has to pay Merck & Co. $2.54 billion in patent royalties it may come down to the details of what happened between two scientists who once were close friends.

Merck claims its Idenix unit, which it bought in 2014 for about $3.85 billion, developed a new class of compounds to treat the potentially deadly virus hepatitis C, which attacks the liver and afflicts as many as 150 million people globally. By Merck’s telling, Idenix’s chief executive officer and patent co-inventor, Jean-Pierre Sommadossi, told his “best friend” Raymond ...

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