In order to get the first Covid-19 vaccine licenced in the United States, Moderna is suing Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech for patent infringement, claiming that they stole technology that Moderna created years before the epidemic.
According to a news release from Moderna on Friday, the case was filed in the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts and the Regional Court of Düsseldorf in Germany. It demands unspecified monetary damages.
Moderna Chief Executive Stephane Bancel said in the release, “We are bringing these cases to defend the breakthrough mRNA technology platform that we pioneered, spent billions of dollars developing, and patented over the decade prior to the COVID-19 epidemic. One of the first organisations to create a vaccine for the brand-new coronavirus was Moderna Inc., who worked alone, and the collaboration between Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE.
Moderna, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had only been around for ten years when it pioneered the messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine technology that allowed the COVID-19 vaccine to be developed with exceptional rapidity.
Thanks in large part to the development of mRNA vaccines, which instruct human cells on how to produce a protein that will elicit an immune response, an approval procedure that used to take years was finished in months.
The messenger RNA, or mRNA,-based technology used in the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines is the same. These vaccines use messenger RNA molecules, which instruct the body’s cells to create specific proteins.
According to Dr. Adam Taylor, a virologist and research fellow at Griffith University’s Menzies Health Institute in Queensland, mRNA reaches cells soon after vaccination and instructs them to produce a SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which triggers the immune response. Antibodies that grow and stay in the blood and fight the actual virus when it infects serve as the body’s defence against a Covid infection.
When it teamed up with the American pharmaceutical behemoth Pfizer, BioNTech, based in Germany, was also engaged in this industry. In December 2020, Pfizer/BioNTech was the first to receive an emergency use authorization for the Covid-19 vaccine, and Moderna received it a week later.
The COVID vaccine, the sole commercial product of Moderna, generated $10.4 billion in sales this year compared to around $22 billion for Pfizer’s vaccine.
Before COVID-19 surfaced in 2019 and blasted into the public eye in early 2020, Moderna claims that Pfizer/BioNTech illegally copied mRNA technology that Moderna had patented between 2010 and 2016. This is when Moderna claims that this occurred.
In order to enable others in creating their own vaccines, particularly for low- and middle-income nations, Moderna said early in the epidemic that it would not prosecute its Covid-19 patents. However, Moderna stated in March 2022 that it anticipated businesses like Pfizer and BioNTech to respect its intellectual property rights. Before March 8, 2022, it said that it will not pursue damages for any actions.
In the early stages of new technology, patent litigation is not unusual.
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