Elan trumpets earning potential from court win

IN these troubled times Elan seems to have come up with a mice little earner.

The company has won a court victory supporting its right to charge the prestigious Mayo research foundation licence fees for its use of transgenetic mice developed and patented by Elan.

The ruling couldn’t have come at a better time, with Elan having been dogged by US accountancy woes which saw its shares drop sharply and left its shareholders really cheesed off.

The court battle with the Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research centred on transgenetic mice patented by Elan for use in laboratory experiments into potential treatments for Alzheimer’s disease.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled that Elan was right to claim licence fees for the foundation’s use of the mice.

Elan has plans to extract cash from other companies and institutions which are commercially using the mice whose genetic make-up has been altered to make them susceptible to the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.

The DNA of the mice has been suitably modified to contain a mutated human gene called the ‘Swedish mutation’, as the gene was originally isolated from the cells of a Swedish family who were found to have an unusually high incidence of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.

In effect the court ruled that the Elan mice were ‘new’ and that they were covered by their patent and were not subject to any earlier patents.

Elan has announced the victory to its shareholders indicating that it thinks this is a significant development.

It has not, however, released any figures to suggest how much money the scheme is likely to put in the company’s coffers.

The development is a far cry from the heady days when Elan announced with a big bang its inclusion in the FTSE 100, which it was subsequently forced to leave with a whimper.

But it does strongly suggest that there’s a lot of life still left yet in the troubled trans-Atlantic corporation.