Amsterdam’s UMC teaching hospital is taking former Labour minister and PVV prime ministerial hopeful Ronald Plasterk to court in a dispute over cancer therapy patents.

Plasterk and German pharmaceuticals company CureVac are accused acted unlawfully and failing to respect the rights of both the UMC and another researcher, Jan Koster, who worked on project which led to the patents, the NRC reported at the weekend.

In 2022 Plasterk sold his own company Frame Therapeutics to pharmaceuticals giant CureVac, including its patents, for €32 million. But Koster was excluded from the deal and the takeover led to clinical trials with new treatments being blocked by CureVac, the paper said.

“Those patent applications are largely based on knowledge funded with public money, so a portion of the proceeds should rightfully benefit the public domain,” UMC told the NRC.

As yet, no date has been set for the civil case and Plasterk told broadcaster NOS he had not been involved in the negotiations to head off the threat of legal action.

The row led to Plasterk ruling himself out as a potential prime minister during the cabinet negotiations last year. Plasterk, 67, was never officially nominated for the job, but was widely tipped to be PVV leader Geert Wilders’s choice to head the cabinet.