Royalties have already begun rolling in from European sales of the Northwestern-developed drug Lyrica, but University President Henry Bienen said Wednesday he does not know how much money to expect from the drug’s total sales.
Bienen said the funds from Lyrica, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration on Dec. 31 to treat pain associated with diabetes and a type of herpes, will help boost the university’s endowment.
The FDA still is reviewing Lyrica as a potential treatment for partial seizures caused by epilepsy. Lyrica is approved for all three uses in Europe and has been on the market in the United Kingdom and Germany since July. Lyrica is not yet approved for the treatment of generalized anxiety disorder in either area.
Standard and Poor’s Equity Research recently estimated that Lyrica could make $1 billion a year in domestic sales, but Bienen said he could not speculate on the amount of money NU will receive from Lyrica sales. Few checks have arrived from European sales, he said, and the drug is not yet sold in the United States.
NU receives 6 percent of the drug’s revenue and recently received checks for the third quarter of Lyrica sales in Europe, according to Indrani Mukharji, executive director of the technology transfer program.
Mukharji declined to release specific figures but said the royalty checks have been “higher than (she) thought they would be.”
Rebecca Hamm, a spokeswoman for Pfizer, the company that markets Lyrica, also declined to release information about Lyrica’s European sales.
Pfizer has not picked a specific date to release Lyrica in the U.S. because the drug is classified as a controlled substance, a category of medicine with a higher-than-normal potential for being abused or becoming addictive, Hamm said.
Now, she added, the Drug Enforcement Administration must make a final decision about the level of classification the drug will receive.
Bienen said NU’s royalties will go toward the university’s endowment and to funding graduate fellowships, the office of the vice president for research and “renewal and replacement” — general maintenance such as fixing sewers and painting buildings.
“By adding to the endowment for that, you’d have more money that would spin out for that every year, and we need it for that,” Bienen said.
Bienen said it is generally harder to raise funds in these areas. Alumni usually donate to undergraduate rather than graduate fellowships, he said, and donors prefer to fund new construction projects rather than ongoing maintenance.
“People are more excited for building something new than they are about giving you money to continue doing maintenance,” he said. “That’s not what people give you money for — to fix a generator or paint a building. For most people, that’s not an exciting thing.”
As a result, Bienen said, some of the money from NU’s Lyrica royalties will go toward capital construction, such as erecting a new music building and expanding Norris University Center, “but all those things also depend on whether we have other private money for those buildings.”
“We’re not going to build whole buildings,” he said. “We’ve never done that.”
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