An advocacy group has asked the National Institutes of Health to investigate whether several patents held by Aegerion Pharmaceuticals failed to disclose federal funding for grants that were used to develop a pricey cholesterol treatment.
In its request, the advocacy group cited a federal database showing six patents were awarded to the University of Pennsylvania, where an academic researcher used NIH grants to develop a drug called Juxtapid, which was later licensed to Aegerion Pharmaceuticals. The school has received more than $68 million in grants for research led by Dr. Daniel Rader, who chairs the genetics department at the Perelman School of Medicine, and at least $293,000 pertained to his work on Juxtapid, according to Knowledge Ecology International, the advocacy group.
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