UI gets $9.5 million settlement

The University of Iowa received $9.5 million in a lawsuit settlement with Abbott Laboratories in a patent infringement case, documents released today by UI officials reveal.  The settlement was reached in November 2009.

The UI had filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Abbott in U.S. District Court, Southern District, regarding an invention and patent by Professor Mark F. Stinski titled "transfer vectors and microorganisms containing human cytomegalovirus immediate-early promoter-regulatory DNA sequence."

The UI in March 2009 received a $19 million settlement in a separate lawsuit involving a patent developed by Stinski. That suit was filed by the university and the UI Research Foundation in  in September 2008 against Amgen Inc. and various Amgen affiliates. That $19 million settlement, per the UI's intellectual property policy, was divided with one-quarter each going to the inventor, the inventor's department, the office of the Vice President for Research and the UI Research Foundation. Stinski is a microbiology professor in the Carver College of Medicine.