The latest leg of a global legal battle began in Britain on Tuesday when Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech asked the court to revoke rival Moderna’s patents over technology crucial to the development of vaccines for Covid-19.
The pair had sued Moderna in September 2022 in efforts to revoke patents held by Moderna, which hit back days later alleging its patents had been infringed.
Reuters reports that the competing lawsuits over the companies’ two vaccines that helped save millions of lives and made the companies billions of dollars, are just one strand of ongoing litigation around the world, which focuses on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology.
Moderna says Pfizer and BioNTech copied mRNA advances it had pioneered and patented long before the pandemic began in late 2019.
US-based Moderna is seeking damages for alleged infringement of its patents by Pfizer and BioNTech’s Comirnaty shot on sales since March 2022.
Pfizer made $11.2bn bin sales from Comirnaty last year, while Moderna earned $6.7bn from its vaccine Spikevax, illustrating the potentially huge sums at stake.
Pfizer and BioNTech, however, are asking the High Court to revoke Moderna’s patents, arguing that the latter’s developments of mRNA technology were obvious improvements on previous work.
The London lawsuits have been split into three separate trials, with one due to consider Moderna’s 2020 pledge not to enforce its vaccine-related patents during the pandemic starting next.
Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna are also involved in parallel proceedings in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and the United States, as well as at the European Patent Office.
Reuters article – Pfizer vs Moderna battle over COVID vaccine patents begins in UK (Open access)
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