Moderna unsure of COVID-19 vaccine patent exclusivity
US biotech company Moderna has said it’s possible that it may not be the first company to make the inventions claimed in its pending patent applications, which include the breakthroughs for its experimental COVID-19 vaccine.
In a recent regulatory filing, Moderna stated that it cannot be certain that it was the first to file for patent protection of its inventions, which includes its investigational vaccine mRNA-1273.
“Because certain US patent applications are confidential until the patents issue … third parties may have filed patent applications for technology covered by our pending patent applications without our being aware of those applications, and our patent applications may not have priority over those applications,” said the quarterly filing.
Moderna added that because of this “and other reasons”, it may be unable to secure patent rights and thereby lose exclusivity.
“Our pending patent applications may not result in issued patents. The patent position of pharmaceutical or biotechnology companies, including ours, is generally uncertain and involves complex legal and factual considerations,” said the filing. “The standards that the US Patent and Trademark Office and its foreign counterparts use to grant patents are not always applied predictably or uniformly and can change.”
Yesterday, August 11, Moderna announced that the US government would pay approximately $1.5 billion for 100 million doses of mRNA-1273.
Moderna had previously been awarded up to $955 million from the US government’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority for the development of the investigational vaccine.
The latest agreement forms part of President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed vaccine programme. LSIPR has previously reported on the government’s agreements with Sanofi and GSK (worth up to $2.1 billion) and Pfizer and BioNTech (worth up to $2 billion).
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