Moderna biotech company, filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Pfizer and BioNTech for allegedly copying their mRNA technology to make their COVID-19 vaccine, Comirnaty.

The pharmaceutical giant said its technology was copied without its permission.

In a statement posted on its website on Friday, Moderna said “innovative technology” that it pioneered long before the COVID-19 pandemic was central to the development of its vaccine called Spikevax.

He noted that the lawsuit would be filed on Friday in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts and the Düsseldorf Regional Court in Germany.

“We are filing these lawsuits to protect the groundbreaking mRNA technology platform that we pioneered, spent billions of dollars creating, and patented over the decade prior to the COVID-19 pandemic,” the CEO statement said. Modern, Stephane Bancel.

“This foundational platform, which we began building in 2010, coupled with our proprietary work on coronavirus in 2015 and 2016, enabled us to produce a safe and highly effective COVID-19 vaccine in record time post-pandemic.”

Both Comirnaty and Spikevax are COVID-19 vaccines licensed for emergency use and approved by the US Food and Drugs (FDA).

According to the FDA, Comirnaty is for active immunization to prevent COVID-19 caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in people 12 years of age and older, while Spikevax is for people 18 years of age and older. years of age onwards.

Both Comirnaty and Spikevax are FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccines authorized for emergency use.

Patent infringement

Explaining further, Moderna said it believes Pfizer and BioNTech copied two key features of Moderna’s proprietary technologies that it said are critical to the success of mRNA vaccines.

The statement further stated in part: “When COVID-19 emerged, neither Pfizer nor BioNTech had Moderna’s level of expertise in developing mRNA vaccines for infectious diseases, knowingly following Moderna’s lead in developing their own vaccine. .

“First, Pfizer and BioNTech clinically tested four different vaccine candidates, including options that would have strayed from Moderna’s innovative path. However, Pfizer and BioNTech ultimately decided to proceed with a vaccine that has the exact same chemical mRNA modification in its vaccine as Spikevax.

“Second, and again despite having many different options, Pfizer and BioNTech copied Moderna’s approach to encode the full-length spike protein in a lipid nanoparticle formulation for a coronavirus.”