Moderna Inc. on Friday filed lawsuits against Pfizer Inc. and German partner BioNTech SE, alleging the pair infringed patents relating to its mRNA platform, a key technology behind all of their COVID vaccines.
The suits were filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts and the Regional Court of Düsseldorf in Germany and related to patents that were filed between 2010 and 2016.
“This groundbreaking technology was critical to the development of Moderna’s own mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, Spikevax,” the company said in a statement.
“Pfizer and BioNTech copied this technology, without Moderna’s permission, to make Comirnaty,” said the statement, referring to the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.
Pfizer and BioNTech responded by saying they had not yet fully reviewed Moderna’s complaint, “but we are surprised by the litigation given the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine was based on BioNTech’s proprietary mRNA technology and developed by both BioNTech and Pfizer.
“We remain confident in our intellectual property supporting the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and will vigorously defend against the allegations of the lawsuit,” they said in a statement.
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Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said the company was seeking to protect the technology that cost billions of dollars in investments in the decade leading up to the pandemic.
The company said Pfizer and BioNTech originally took four different vaccine candidates into testing, but eventually decided to move forward with a vaccine that had the same mRNA chemical modification as the Moderna one.
Moderna researchers had introduced mRNA into the body in 2010 and were first to validate it in human trials back in 2015, said the company.