Moderna sues Pfizer and BionTech for patent infringement
Moderna announced Friday that it has sued rivals Pfizer and BioNTech SE, claiming that their Covid-19 vaccine mRNA technology infringes its patents on the same matter.
The lawsuit, filed in United States District Court in Massachusetts and Germany, seeks unspecified monetary damages for patent infringement and sets the stage for a massive legal battle between the three vaccine manufacturers.
The pandemics are officially over. The lawsuits begin https://t.co/wm8uaYgy34
– zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 26, 2022
In a statement on Friday, Moderna, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, accused partners Pfizer and BioNTech of infringing key mRNA patents in the development of the Comirnaty vaccine. The company claims it patented the mRNA technology that made its Spikevax vaccine possible from 2010 to 2016, which the other two companies copied without authorization.
Moderna said it is not asking the courts to withdraw Pfizer-BioNTech's Covid vaccine from the market or to block future sales. The company is seeking compensation for the period that began on March 8 this year and says it will not seek compensation for Pfizer's sales in 92 low- and middle-income countries. In short, Moderna wants a piece of the pie of the larger society. At the beginning of the Covid crisis, Moderna had promised not to enforce its intellectual property during the pandemic, but on 7 March it modified that commitment to apply it only to low-income countries, essentially making this cause possible. -Bloomberg
"We are taking these lawsuits to protect the innovative mRNA technology platform we pioneered, which we invested billions of dollars in creating and which we patented in the decade preceding the Covid-19 pandemic," said Stephane Bancel, CEO of Modern, in a press release.
Last year Pfizer recorded nearly $ 37 billion in sales from Comirnaty, while Moderna earned about $ 18 billion from Spikevax. In Cambridge they must have had a little envy.
The cause is the latest – and will undoubtedly be the biggest – in the industry. Earlier this year, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals sued Moderna, Pfizer, and BioNTech over the lipid nanoparticle technology used in both of their Covid vaccines, while Moderna waged a legal battle with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) over determine whether the agency's scientists should be listed as inventors of their jab.
In the lawsuit, Moderna claims Pfizer and BioNTech had other options but “decided to proceed with a vaccine that features the exact same chemical modification of the mRNA as its vaccine” as their treatment. Moderna also accuses the couple of copying their method of encoding a full-length spike protein into a lipid nanoparticle.
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The Moderna article sues Pfizer and BionTech for patent infringement comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/moderna-fa-causa-a-pfizer-e-biontech-per-violazione-di-brevetto/ on Fri, 26 Aug 2022 16:29:30 +0000.