Resolution

After years of negotiation and legal disputes, there are still fundamental questions regarding the ownership of the patents and therefore the right to license the treatment. Dr. Kaswan continues to pursue an appeal to have her case heard before a jury and to force UGA and Allergan to disclose the details of the renegotiated agreement that has been secreted from public scrutiny.

Additionally, Dr. Kaswan plans to encourage a call for reform of the standards of conduct associated with the Intellectual Property Policies of UGA.

What was about to become a UGA 'home run' became instead a bottomless pit of lost opportunity, expensive litigation and controversy. In closed-door meetings, absent both public and inventor's input or oversight, Allergan allegedly enriched themselves by offering fraudulent information and inducements to UGARF to accept unreasonable new contract terms.

The University left hundreds of millions of dollars on the table. These funds could have financed PhD students, built research laboratories, funded faculty salaries, financed other research projects, and generally bridged budget shortfalls. Instead litigators destroyed the mutually productive relationship with UGA's luminary scientist and distracted an innovative researcher from productive scientific endeavor. Beyond the loss of $220 million dollars, UGA lost an invaluable opportunity for positive publicity and traded it for a publicity quagmire that will damage faculty recruiting efforts for the foreseeable future.

The downfall of UGA's home run invention was apparently the coincidence of two unforeseeable events: a covert corporate agenda, Allergan's "Florida Plan", to reduce all of their royalty expenses associated with Restasis®, concurrent to a furtive abuse of power by the UGA president who procured an instant burst in UGA discretionary income to secure his job.