Clint Eastwood takes on medical company over diabetes patents
Actor Clint Eastwood has gone to war against a medical company which he claims took patents covering an antioxidant from an inventor.
Eastwood accused Nevada-based Molecular Defenses Corporation (MDC) of manipulating a business deal in order to acquire the patents for glutathione, an antioxidant used to combat diabetes and other diseases.
He filed the claim on Wednesday, July 25 at the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Harry Demopoulos, a professor and medical doctor, devoted a substantial portion of his life’s work to the research and development of glutathione, claimed Eastwood.
“In the words of defendant Kevin Davis (the president and CEO of Nevada-based MDC), Eastwood is ‘the man who made it possible to prove glutathione could be absorbed’,” said the lawsuit, after explaining that Eastwood had supported Demopoulos’s mission with substantial investments over the past three decades.
Demopoulos obtained six US patents and two international patents related to the pharmaceutical preparation and methods for administering glutathione. These patents were assigned to Demopoulos’s company Antioxidant Pharmaceuticals Corporation (APC).
In 2015, Demopoulos sought to restructure and consolidate his businesses under the umbrella of his newly-formed New York business entity, the defendant MDC, with the participation of a newcomer to the glutathione business, the defendant Davis.
This is where the trouble began, according to Eastwood.
In the midst of this, Demopoulos unexpectedly suffered a massive stroke in early 2016. “It was at this tragic time when defendants pounced, seizing Dr Demopoulos’s business (and six US glutathione patents) for their own ends,” alleged the claim.
Two weeks after Demopoulos’s stroke, Davis reportedly incorporated Nevada-based MDC and the defendants prepared a subscription agreement (“purportedly signed” by Demopoulos’s ‘attorney in fact’) providing for the assignment of the patents.
Demopoulos passed away shortly after, “leaving unfinished (and in shambles) his alleged efforts to consolidate his business and account for the resulting rights and equity owed [to] the shareholders”, said the claim.
Eastwood alleged that a new US derivative patent has recently been issued, with two claimed inventors: Demopoulos and Davis.
The actor also claimed that he didn’t know that Demopoulos’s company APC was dissolved 15 years ago, adding that there was no distribution of assets to its shareholders, including the Eastwood Trust.
Now, Eastwood is seeking “redress for other shareholders whom defendants are likewise swindling through outright usurpation, covert IP transfers, and corporate shell games.”.
Eastwood has asked the court to find that Demopoulos is the sole inventor of the derivative patent, remove Davis as inventor from that patent, and declare that the defendants don’t have ownership over the remaining patents.
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