Gilead's loss is B-MS' gain in battle of CAR-T subsidiaries

A US jury has ordered the Gilead Sciences (Nasdaq: GILD) subsidiary Kite Pharma to pay a total of $752 million to Juno Therapeutics – which has now become part of Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY) – and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC).

The US District Court for the Central District of California found that Kite’s CAR-T therapy Yescarta (axicabtagene ciloleucel) violated a MSKCC patent that Juno had licensed.

Gilead, which acquired Kite in 2017, has been told to pay B-MS $585 million as well as royalties of 27.6% on sales of Yescarta, which has won approvals in diffuse large B-cell lymphoma and primary mediastinal large B-cell lymphoma. As the roll-out of the therapy continues across the USA and Europe, its sales for the third-quarter of this year were $118 million.