The president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York is in a billion-dollar dispute with his former workplace, a cancer institute at the University of Pennsylvania, over accusations that he walked away with groundbreaking research and used it to help start a valuable biotechnology company.

In a lawsuit, the Leonard and Madlyn Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute at Penn described its former scientific director, Dr. Craig B. Thompson, as “an unscrupulous doctor” who “chose to abscond with the fruits of the Abramson largess.”

The dispute reflects the importance that academic research centers now place on turning discoveries made on their campuses into sources of revenue. Some have engaged in protracted legal battles to ensure compensation for their intellectual property. Yale, for example, won more than $1 million in compensation and legal fees in 2005 from a Nobel laureate it had accused of taking its technology.

But the lawsuit against Dr. Thompson has particularly high stakes, potentially affecting the reputations and finances of two of the country’s most prestigious cancer centers.