Granting Bristol-Myers Squibb overseas development and marketing rights to the anti-PD-1 antibody (2011)

What it means to divide the rights in order to reach the world

To read this alliance as a mid-sized firm surrendering the world market to a giant is to mistake the order of events. Ono had neither an oncology franchise nor antibody technology; thirteen Japanese companies turned the programme down, and it was only by finally locating Medarex overseas that the anti-PD-1 antibody got as far as it did. Precisely because it held the foundation — the joint patent with Professor Honjo — the company was in a position, under president Sagara Gyo, to hand BMS the rights to the world outside North America. Facing the plain fact that alone it could not keep pace with the global approval race, it chose to release part of the rights in order to deliver the first cancer immunotherapy to patients in every country.

The price of dividing those rights was not small. Much of what the drug earned abroad turned into BMS’s share and into royalties, so a substantial part of the revenue was generated outside the company. Beyond that, the distribution of a fruit swollen by global expansion left another fire smouldering — the dispute over what Professor Honjo, who discovered PD-1, was owed. A company that could not have produced so vast a success on its own is left holding the question of how to divide it, with its partner and with the discoverer alike. The weight of the decision that took a world-first drug to the world is of a piece with the difficulty of dividing what it earned.