The University of Minnesota in Minneapolis could receive up to $300 million in royalty payments over the next decade from the sale of Glaxo Wellcome's (GW) new reverse transcriptase inhibitor drug, Ziagen, following an out-of-court settlement of a patent lawsuit with the pharmaceutical company last month.

Ziagen was developed from a class of carbocyclic nucleocide compounds discovered and patented in the late 1980s by university professor Robert Vince, and licensed to GW's pre-merger company, Burroughs Wellcome. The drug was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in December 1998. Despite earlier denials that it owed royalties on the AIDS drug to the university, GW agreed to hand over initial payments totaling $8.25 million to the university by 23 October. The remaining royalty fees will be paid as an incremental percentage of drug sales.

Vince, and colleague Mei Hua, will receive one-third of the settlement, and under federal law the remainder will go to the university to be used for research and education. One-quarter of those funds will go back into Vince's department to support graduate fellowships and build a new drug design center.

Vince, who worked as a post-doc in the laboratory where the first antiviral drug, acyclovir, also manufactured by GW, was discovered, says that the lawsuit has been a "far bigger disruption to his work than he anticipated," but that he pursued the claim to gain scientific recognition for his work on the drug.