Moderna sues Pfizer and BioNTech over corona vaccine

Moderna is suing its US pharmaceutical rival Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech for patent infringement in the development of the first Covid-19 vaccine approved in the United States, alleging they copied technology that Moderna developed years before the pandemic.The lawsuit, which seeks undetermined monetary damages, was being filed in US district court in Massachusetts and the regional court of Düsseldorf in Germany, Moderna said in a news release on Friday.“We are filing these lawsuits to protect the innovative mRNA technology platform that we pioneered, invested billions of dollars in creating, and patented during the decade preceding the Covid-19 pandemic,” Moderna’s chief executive, Stéphane Bancel, said in the statement.Moderna Inc, on its own, and the partnership of Pfizer and BioNTech were two of the first groups to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus.Just a decade old as a company, Moderna, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had been an innovator in the messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine technology that enabled the unprecedented speed in developing the Covid-19 vaccine after the coronavirus pandemic began in late 2019 and spread around the world.An approval process that previously took years was completed in months, thanks largely to the breakthrough in mRNA vaccines, which teach human cells how to make a protein that will trigger an immune response.Germany-based BioNTech had also been working in this field when it partnered with the US pharma giant Pfizer.The US Food and Drug Administration granted emergency use authorization for the Covid-19 vaccine first to Pfizer/BioNTech in December 2020, then one week later to Moderna.Moderna alleges Pfizer/BioNTech, without permission, copied mRNA technology that Moderna had patented between 2010 and 2016, well before deadly Covid-19 emerged in 2019 in China and exploded into global consciousness in early 2020.Early in the pandemic, Moderna said it would not enforce its Covid-19 patents to help others develop their own vaccines, particularly for low- and middle-income countries.