Vaccine makers hit back against patent claims
German biotech and its US big pharma partner file counter complaint | Under-fire pair say they didn’t infringe patents | Claims reject earlier suit as an attempt to profit through legal threats.
BioNTech, and its COVID-19 vaccine partner Pfizer, have filed a complaint in the US, seeking a ruling that they didn’t infringe patents owned by Germany-based CureVac.
Filed on Monday, July 25, at the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, the suit alleged that CureVac had failed to develop a COVID-19 vaccine product and had instead “turned its attention to an attempt to profit from the success of BioNTech and Pfizer through threats of patent infringement”.
In early July, CureVac accused BioNTech of infringing four patents related to messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology in a suit filed at the German Regional Court in Düsseldorf.
At the time, CureVac said that it had “moved to assert its intellectual property rights, accumulated over more than two decades of pioneering work in mRNA technology”.
Now, BioNTech and Pfizer have asked the US court to find that CureVac’s US patent numbers 11,135,312, 11,149,278, and 11,241,493 have not been infringed by their mRNA vaccine against COVID-19.
According to the partners, CureVac's US patents are equivalent to the German patents invoked by CureVac in its own suit.
“Plaintiffs fund pharmaceutical research and development in part with revenues from Comirnaty vaccine. CureVac’s assertion of the patents-in-suit in connection with Comirnaty vaccine has created a cloud of uncertainty, inter alia, with respect to what portion of the revenues from Comirnaty vaccine plaintiffs may invest into that research and development,” said the suit.
BioNTech and Pfizer have also asked the court to prevent CureVac from pursuing further assertions of infringement or acts of enforcement based on the US patents against the pair or their business partners, customers, suppliers, and clinical investigators.
CureVac told LSIPR: “We are aware of a declaratory judgment action by BioNTech and Pfizer against CureVac in the US. We will review the matter legally in detail and represent our position accordingly.”
Pfizer and BioNTech were also hit with another patent infringement suit over their vaccine earlier this month.
Alnylam Pharmaceuticals had accused Pfizer (and BioNTech) and Moderna (which has also developed a COVID-19 vaccine) of infringing US patent number 11,382,979, which relates to Alnylam’s lipid nanoparticle (LNP) technology for delivering genetic material into human cells.
The latest round of suits come just months after Alnylam accused the companies of infringing a patent for its LNP technology through the development of their COVID-19 vaccines.
