Pfizer and partner hit back in COVID-19 vaccine dispute

Big pharma firm accused of copying technology when developing vaccine | Dispute will also play out in Germany | BioNTech | Moderna.

Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech have accused Moderna of rewriting history to claim credit for single-handedly developing COVID-19 vaccine technology as the pair seek to dismiss Moderna’s patent suit.

In a defence and counterclaim filing, filed Monday, December 5, Pfizer and BioNTech asked the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts to dismiss Moderna’s suit and to issue an order that Moderna’s patents are invalid and not infringed.

In August this year, Moderna accused Pfizer and BioNTech of copying its technology when developing their COVID-19 vaccine.

Moderna claimed that Pfizer and BioNTech's vaccine Comirnaty infringed patents Moderna filed between 2010 and 2016 covering its foundational mRNA technology. Moderna itself used this technology to develop its own mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, Spikevax.

Moderna has also filed a suit against the pair at the Regional  Court of Düsseldorf in Germany.

Now, in response to the suit, Pfizer and BioNTech have claimed that Moderna has rewritten history to “eliminate the contributions of many brilliant and dedicated scientists and place itself in the single, starring role”.

It added: “Ignoring the contributions of all these others—including defendants’ scientists and those working for the National Institutes of Health—Moderna now alleges that it developed both the Moderna vaccine and the technology behind Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine, and that Moderna deserves credit for the hard work and creative experiments performed by an entire field of researchers in the years before COVID-19 emerged.

“Moderna avers that it alone— not BioNTech, not Pfizer, and not the US government holds critical patent rights to both parties’ COVID-19 vaccines.”

Moderna’s “revisionist history is not based on fact”, alleged the pair, claiming that they didn’t copy Moderna’s technology and instead independently developed their vaccine.

“Moderna did not contribute to the development of Defendants’ COVID-19 vaccine, which is different from Moderna’s vaccine. Moderna will fail in its attempt to stretch already overbroad (and, as contended herein, invalid) patents to try to claim credit for others’ work,” said the filing.

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