Moderna filed lawsuits against Pfizer and BioNTech due to patent infringement over COVID vaccine
On Friday, Moderna announced that they are suing Pfizer and BioNTech, saying that the two companies stole Moderna’s technology in order to develop their vaccine called Comirnaty for the COVID virus.
Shannon Thyme Klinger, the Chief Legal Officer of Moderna, said in a statement that “We believe that Pfizer and BioNTech unlawfully copied Moderna’s inventions, and they have continued to use them without permission.”
A press statement says that lawsuits alleging patent infringement have been filed in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts and the Regional Court of Düsseldorf in Germany.
According to Moderna, the company filed patents for its mRNA technology between the years of 2010 and 2016, which proved to be an essential part in the development of the company’s very own Covid vaccine. The company asserts that Pfizer and BioNTech copied the identical technology for Comirnaty.
“We are filing these lawsuits to protect the innovative mRNA technology platform that we pioneered, invested billions of dollars in creating, and patented during the decade preceding the COVID-19 pandemic,” Moderna’s CEO, Stéphane Bancel, said.
“This foundational platform, which we began building in 2010, along with our patented work on coronaviruses in 2015 and 2016, enabled us to produce a safe and highly effective Covid-19 vaccine in record time after the pandemic struck.”
Bancel said that the company will keep using the technology to make medicines for autoimmune diseases, heart ailments, rare types of cancer, and infectious diseases like HIV and influenza.
