UCLA gets windfall from Xtandi rights

Abstract

The University of California, Los Angeles, has joined an elite group of academic institutions to hit the drug discovery jackpot. Royalty Pharma, a company that buys drug royalty rights, has paid $1.14 billion for part of the royalty rights for Medivation’s prostate cancer drug Xtandi, which was discovered by UCLA chemist Michael Jung and physician Charles Sawyers. The university will receive about half of that sum. Also benefiting are UCLA’s chemistry department, the inventors, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, where Sawyers was a researcher at the time of the drug’s invention. UCLA says the money will be put into an investment portfolio that should yield roughly $60 million annually until 2027. Those proceeds will allow UCLA to support research, undergraduate scholarships, and graduate student fellowships. The payout was more than a decade in the making. In 2005, Medivation licensed a collection of androgen receptor inhibitors, including Xtandi, discovered by Jung