The makers of the two most widely used COVID19 vaccines in the United States are now in a patent fight over their shots.
One of the three inventions claimed by Moderna in a legal battle that has erupted over the messenger RNA vaccines against COVID-19 was actually patented years earlier by two university scientists.filed on 26 August in a U.S. district court in Massachusetts, Moderna accuses Pfizer and its partner BioNTech of “co-opting Moderna’s patented inventions” covering different aspects of the two COVID-19 vaccines, which have already earned the companies billions of dollars.
The two vaccines were the first authorized for COVID-19 in the United States and the first to show the mRNA platform worked, for any pathogen, in people. Moderna said in 2020 it would not enforce patent claims while the pandemic was ongoing. Jacob Sherkow, a patent attorney at the University of Illinois College of Law, suspects the company has changed its tune because it and Pfizer-BioNTech will soon have new markets for formulations of their vaccines that target coronavirus variants.
At the heart of Moderna’s patent infringement claim are the steps that opened the door for mRNA as a vaccine. Drew Weissman and Katalin Karikó, both at the University of Pennsylvania , published the fundamental discovery in 2005: They showed that altering one of the fundamental building blocks of mRNA, the nucleotide uridine, made the molecule less toxic and also more capable of dodging immune destruction.mRNA, has a patent for a specific modification known as 1-methylpseudouridine.
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