Top surgeons who say they were duped into signing away rights to a world-leading innovation have uncovered emails and letters they believe support their case.
Professor John Webb, 82, once surgeon to the Royal Family, and his Swiss colleague Professor Max Aebi, 77, developed spinal implants that helped hundreds of thousands of patients worldwide.
But they say they were unwittingly persuaded to sign papers without legal advice – handing intellectual property to a firm controlled by Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss, now co-owner of Chelsea Football Club. That firm and its innovations were then sold to Johnson & Johnson in 2012.
Despite the Universal Spine System (USS) achieving billions of pounds in sales, neither man was paid for developing the implants in the 1980s and 1990s.
Webb – who treated the then Prince Charles for a polo injury at Queen’s Medical Centre, Nottingham, in 1990 – said he met Wyss as often as 30 times, and says Wyss always assured him they would be paid fairly.
The two developed the implants while working for the Swiss-based AO research foundation, bankrolled by Wyss. They say they unwittingly signed over rights to Wyss’s firm Synthes.
Dispute: Professors John Webb, 82 and Max Aebi say they unwittingly handed intellectual property to a firm controlled by Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss (pictured)
The Mail on Sunday has seen a copy of a 2003 email from Erwin Locher, then an executive at one of AO’s partner companies. He suggested ‘surgeon inventors’ of Synthes products should receive ‘2 per cent of transfer sales’ as royalties. Based on sales data up to 2023, Webb and Aebi say their royalties from USS could total $66 billion (£48.5 million). Locher said the policy would ‘have to be approved by the AO Spine Board’ and was a ‘base for discussion’ – but nothing further happened.
Webb said: ‘Meetings of the AO Foundation were twice a year. [Wyss] always came to them. We would ask him, are you going to recompense us? He would say, don’t worry. That was maybe as many as 30 times.’ The surgeons even spent three months a year over a decade touring the world to promote the system, receiving only expenses.
Both men say they would put the royalties into a foundation to support independent research and education. Wyss, 89, was approached for comment.
A spokesman for Johnson & Johnson said: ‘As we shared previously, we reviewed the materials submitted by the claimants and confirmed that there is no basis for their claim. We stand by that assessment.’
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