With the lawsuit against Biontech and Pfizer, Moderna wants to protect its mRNA technology platform.
(Photo: AP)
Frankfurt The corona vaccine business is increasingly becoming a field of activity for patent attorneys. According to Curevac, the US biotech company Moderna also filed suit against Mainz-based Biontech and its US partner Pfizer in the US and before the Düsseldorf Regional Court on Friday.
Moderna accuses its competitors of infringing important mRNA technology patents filed between 2010 and 2016 with its successful Comirnaty Covid vaccine. The technologies being researched at the time were fundamental to Moderna’s Spikevax vaccine. “Pfizer and Biontech copied these without permission to make their own Comirnaty vaccine,” Moderna explained.
Moderna had already invested “billions of dollars” before the outbreak of the pandemic and wanted to protect its innovative technology platform, said CEO Stephane Bancel. The aim is not to ban Comirnaty from the market, but expect that Biontech and Pfizer will pay damages for using the patents.
Biontech was initially unavailable for comment. The district court in Düsseldorf stated that it could not confirm the receipt of such a lawsuit for the time being. Pfizer said it had not been informed of any legal proceedings and could not yet comment on it.
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Specifically, Moderna complains that Biontech and Pfizer copied two key elements of their own technology. Biontech and Pfizer had tested four vaccine candidates, some of which would have circumvented Moderna’s patent rights. In the end, however, Biontech opted for the vaccine that has exactly the same chemical modification as Spikevax.
On the other hand, Biontech also copied the Moderna approach of encoding the full length of the corona spike protein and packaging the mRNA in lipid nanoparticles. This technique was developed years earlier when working on vaccines against the Mers virus.
Curevac is already suing Biontech
The opponents are by far the leading players in the field of Covid vaccines. Pfizer and Biontech have shipped more than 3.6 billion doses of Comirnaty to date and are expecting sales of $32 billion (at Pfizer) and €13-17 billion at Biontech this year. Moderna forecasts $21 billion in sales for its own vaccines business. The patent dispute could therefore have considerable financial weight, but is likely to drag on for years.
In early July, Tübingen-based Curevac filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Biontech. Here, too, the allegation is that Biontech is violating intellectual property rights in the area of mRNA with its vaccine. According to Curevac, these relate, among other things, to the technical production of mRNA molecules and the specific vaccine formulation against the coronavirus.
Biontech denied these allegations and said the Covid-19 vaccine was based on Biontech’s mRNA technology and was jointly developed with Pfizer. The two partners countered the Curevac lawsuit at the end of July with a declaratory judgment in a court in the US state of Massachusetts. There they want to obtain a ruling that three of Curevac’s US patents are not infringed by their Covid-19 vaccine Comirnaty.
The Tübingen-based company, which failed at the first attempt with its own Covid vaccine, has long pointed out that it has a particularly broad patent base in the mRNA area, citing, among other things, studies by the US analysis company Lexisnexis, which For example, patent databases are also analyzed.
Lots of lawsuits surrounding mRNA technology
Accordingly, Curevac has the strongest patent portfolio in the mRNA area, followed by the US companies Gilead and Moderna and the British pharmaceutical company Glaxo-Smithkline. Biontech is clearly behind. However, such quantitative analyzes do not necessarily say anything about the concrete strength and enforceability of patents with regard to individual products.
In addition, the lawsuits against Biontech are by no means the only ones in the field of mRNA. Rather, there are already a number of methods. In the USA, for example, the biotech companies Arbutus Biopharma and Genevant Sciences are suing the mRNA vaccine manufacturer Moderna.
The biotech company Alnylam, which is also working intensively on mRNA-based drugs and has already successfully launched several products on the market, is taking action against both Moderna and Pfizer. She accuses the two companies of violating their own patents by packaging their mRNA vaccines in lipid particles.
More: Biontech could deliver first Omicron vaccine “early September”.