On Friday, the vaccine manufacturer Moderna filed a lawsuit against Pfizer and BioNTech, alleging that the Covid-19 shot offered by its competitors breaches the patents defending its ground-breaking invention.
In a statement, Moderna claimed that Pfizer and BioNTech violated patents covering its mRNA technology that were submitted between 2010 and 2016. Moderna, a company situated in Cambridge, Massachusetts, filed a lawsuit against BioNTech in the Regional Court of Düsseldorf in Germany and the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts.
Moderna’s spokesman, Christopher Ridley, stated that the company did not have a ballpark figure for the number of damages it was requesting.
According to Pfizer spokeswoman Jerica Pitts, the litigation “surprised” Pfizer and its development partner BioNTech. They “remain confident in our intellectual property backing the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine,” she continued, “and will vigorously defend against the allegations of the complaint.”
Coronavirus vaccines have been created using messenger RNA (mRNA), the genetic script that transmits DNA instructions to each cell’s protein-making machinery.
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“We are filing these lawsuits to protect the innovative mRNA technology platform that we pioneered, invested billions of dollars in developing, and patented during the decade preceding the Covid-19 pandemic,” said Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel. “With our patented work on coronaviruses in 2015 and 2016, we were able to produce a safe and highly effective Covid-19 vaccine in record time after the pandemic struck.”
In fall 2020, Moderna said that it would not enforce its Covid-related patents while the pandemic persisted. Moderna got close to $10 billion in taxpayer funds to produce the vaccine, test it, and give doses to the federal government.
However, on March 7, the business announced that it was upgrading its commitment because the availability of vaccines outside of the world’s poorest nations was no longer a problem.
Manufacturers outside the 92 poorest nations are expected to respect the company’s intellectual property, according to the statement. The company also announced at the time that it was extending its promise to never enforce Covid patents to 92 low- and middle-income nations.
In a statement on Friday, Moderna stated that it was not seeking compensation for actions taken prior to March 8 and that none of the patents in question is related to the intellectual property created during Moderna’s partnership with the National Institutes of Health on Covid-19, which the company claimed started only after patented technologies were successfully implemented in 2015 and 2016.
Second, Moderna claims that Pfizer and BioNTech stole its full-length spike protein formulation for a coronavirus that Moderna developed years before Covid-19. According to the National Institutes of Health, coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that cause mild to moderate upper respiratory tract illnesses. SARS, MERS, and Covid-19 are among the more serious ones.
Breaking News: Moderna sued Pfizer and BioNTech, accusing them of copying the central technology behind its coronavirus vaccine.https://t.co/c5VI9uMXmz
— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 26, 2022
Given the need for coronavirus vaccines, Moderna stated that it was not seeking to remove Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccines from the market, nor was it seeking an injunction to prevent their future sale.
Pfizer and Moderna both submitted to the Food and Drug Administration this week for emergency approval of retooled shots aimed at Omicron subvariants that are causing the majority of new virus cases in the United States. Pfizer’s retooled shot has been ordered by the federal government in quantities of 105 million doses.
Source– The New York Times
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