Elan won $55.2m in damages when a federal jury decided rival, Abraxis BioScience infringed a patent for medicine used to fight breast cancer, contending Abraxis' intravenous paclitaxel drug Abraxane for the treatment of metastatic breast cancer uses technology protected by Elan's 1995 patent for tiny anti-cancer nanoparticles.Paclitaxel is a mitotic inhibitor used in cancer chemotherapy. It was discovered in a National Cancer Institute program at the Research Triangle Institute in 1967 when Monroe E. Wall and Mansukh C. Wani isolated it from the bark of the Pacific yew tree, Taxus brevifolia and named it 'taxol'. When Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) licensed the compound for sale they claimed rights to the name as well and people responded by referring to the generic name as 'paclitaxel', but BMS later lost the court case about naming rights. In this formulation paclitaxel is dissolved in Cremophor EL, a polyoxyethylated castor oil, as a delivery agent since paclitaxel is not soluble in water. A newer formulation, in which paclitaxel is bound to albumin as the delivery agent (Protein-bound paclitaxel), is sold commercially by Abraxis BioScience under the trademark Abraxane
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