UC San Diego won a major legal battle Friday against the University of Southern California when a judge ruled that control of a landmark project on Alzheimer’s disease belongs to the La Jolla school.

The decision addressed the heart of a lawsuit that has gained international attention since UC San Diego filed it early this month, largely because it’s rare for such disagreements in the academic world to reach the courtroom.

The dispute also has been colored by shades of a mounting rivalry between UC San Diego, a research powerhouse that has long been the elite higher-education campus in this region, and USC, a well-heeled institution with ambitions of achieving greatness in biomedicine by taking over or collaborating with scientific centers in San Diego.

“We never wanted to resort to legal action, but when all reasonable requests to return what is the rightful property of UC San Diego were ignored, there was no alternative,” Dr. David Brenner, vice chancellor for health sciences, said in a statement. “We are pleased with today’s decision and believe it indicates the strength of our overall case.”


Left unresolved Friday was UC San Diego’s request for monetary damages based on its accusations that USC, Dr. Paul Aisen and other defendants conspired to illegally transfer the Alzheimer’s Disease Cooperative Study to the Los Angeles-based university. Aisen resigned in June from UC San Diego, where he had overseen the study since 2007, to become founding director of an Alzheimer’s institute that USC was establishing in the Sorrento Valley neighborhood.

In recent weeks, the two sides have argued about who owns the database for the $100 million, nationwide project.

UC San Diego, which has overseen the study for nearly a quarter of a century, said it still retains the government funding — an assertion backed by the National Institutes of Health.

Aisen and USC officials have countered that it’s academic tradition for departing faculty members to transfer their research to their new employer. They presented supporting statements from several researchers taking part in the Alzheimer’s project.


After Friday’s hearing, USC attorney Glenn Dassoff told journalists that USC and Aisen’s interest in the study “is real, genuine, and unfortunately was not addressed today. This is not over.”

In an email Friday night, Aisen wrote: “We all lose here. Science and public health lose when research is torn from the investigators with the passion, knowledge and skill to assure its success.”

In the courtroom, San Diego Superior Court Judge Judith Hayes said she will issue a preliminary injunction early next week that requires USC to surrender custody of the Alzheimer’s project.

She told USC not to manipulate data from the study or make any other changes to the database, which involves details of lab research and clinical trials from dozens of sites across the country.


As the next step, the two universities and their lawyers will negotiate the choice of a “special master” to supervise the process of USC restoring full control of the database to UC San Diego. This phase will involve an independent expert on bioinformatics who can determine whether there has been tampering of information in the database.

Dan Sharp, an attorney representing UC San Diego on behalf of the UC Regents, said USC will start returning the data next week.

“How long it takes will depend on what we find in terms of what they’ve done with the (computer) system, changes they may have made,” he added.

Dassoff, the USC attorney, said while his party disagrees with Hayes’ findings, “we’ll reflect on the decision and I’m sure that (we’ll) approach any settlement discussions in good faith.”


During the hearing, Hayes offered to refer the opposing sides to a settlement judge, with the aim of negotiating an end to the lawsuit instead of proceeding to a jury trial.

UC San Diego alleges that Aisen, USC and up to two dozen other defendants colluded to commit a range of violations, including contract interference, breach of duty of loyalty by employee, commission of computer crimes and civil conspiracy.

Brenner, UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla and others at the university have said the defendants have harmed their school’s reputation. Aisen and his new employer have denied any wrongdoing.

In the past year, USC has reached out to at least three life-science institutions in San Diego to explore a purchase, merger or other types of collaboration. None of those inquiries has resulted in a partnership.


During an interview earlier this month, USC Provost Michael Quick said his university’s envisioned footprint in San Diego could include freestanding institutes, academic consortia and joint ventures with targeted companies.

“The 20th century was dominated by physics. The 21st will be dominated by biomedical sciences,” Quick said. “We have to be at places where the conversations (in life sciences) are the best, and San Diego is one of those places.”

He said about 50 biomedical companies have been spun out of USC in the past decade, but that they tend to leave for San Diego and the San Francisco Bay Area because those locations already have hubs featuring prominent research-oriented universities, independent biomedical institutes, a concentration of biotech firms and various services to support the whole infrastructure.

Being in San Diego can help USC learn how this is done — and how to replicate that success in Los Angeles, Quick said.


“The last thing that we want San Diego to feel is that USC is being threatening. ... People will see that we will be good partners, should we continue to grow down there. We want to be part of the San Diego community,” Quick said.

UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla also expressed goodwill during a recent interview.

“I wouldn’t rule out a collaboration (with USC) in the future,” Khosla said. “You can’t take the difference we’re having and imply that there’s bad blood between us.”

On measures of reputation in the life sciences, UC San Diego bests USC.


The San Diego campus received $390 million in National Institutes of Health funding last year, compared to USC’s $180 million. U.S. News & World Report ranked UC San Diego’s medical school 17th in the nation for research and put USC’s in a three-way tie for 31st.

But in endowment funds, which can bolster faculty pay, UC San Diego’s $752 million is dwarfed by USC’s $4.5 billion, and USC’s fundraising machine far outstrips that of the La Jolla-based university.