Entrepreneur Alfred Mann is close to reaching a final agreement with UCLA over his proposed $100 million donation for a new biomedical institute, after years of delay that had threatened to scuttle the project.
Mann, chairman and chief executive of MiniMed Inc., told the Business Journal that he hopes to have the agreement finalized in time to open the institute on the Westwood campus by the 2002-2003 school year.
“They have given me the markup of all the documents, but I just haven’t had time to look at them yet,” he said. “It is coming forward probably not in time for this coming school year but probably for the next.”
If Mann and the university can close the deal, it would put an end to what has become an embarrassing saga for the university. Its roots stretch back to the early 1990s, when the biomedical pioneer first approached UCLA with the idea.
Issues over who would own the intellectual property rights of innovations developed at the public university proved so thorny that USC President Steven B. Sample was able to convince Mann in 1998 to make an identical donation to that private university first.
As for the status of the UCLA deal, officials of that university declined to provide details last week.
“We are in negotiations with Mr. Mann and look forward to a positive outcome, but we are not prepared at this point to talk about the specifics because we have not come to a final agreement,” said Max Benavidez, the university’s assistant vice chancellor for communications.
Mann also declined to offer any additional details, but W. Dean Baker, director of the USC biomedical institute, said that at Mann’s request he reviewed two drafts of the UCLA agreement, one as recently as a month ago. He said they were not much different from USC’s agreement with Mann.
“The draft I saw is quite similar,” Baker said. “There are some obvious differences because UCLA is a public university and USC is a private one.”
He declined to be more specific, saying he did not want to break any confidences he has with Mann. But he noted that USC’s royalty arrangement was the prime component of its intellectual property agreement with Mann.
In Mann’s agreement with USC, the university receives 30 percent of the royalties derived from products developed at the institute, after costs to obtain the patent are recouped and a share is taken for the inventor. The institute keeps 45 percent to help fund its work, while 25 percent goes to the Alfred E. Mann Foundation, a medical technology research foundation. Mann, who is disbursing his $100 million gift to USC over a decade, also is chairman of the institute’s board.
Intellectual property is a key issue with the centers, because their very purpose is to promote and accelerate the development of biomedical devices from the basic research stage to preliminary product demonstration at clinical trials which could lead to highly profitable commercialization.
