Moderna is suing Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech for patent infringement in the production of the first Covid-19 vaccine authorized in the United States, claiming that they duplicated technology created by Moderna years before the epidemic. Moderna, on the one hand, and the Pfizer-BioNTech partnership, on the other, were the first two to develop a COVID-19 vaccine during the pandemic.

According to a news release from Moderna on Friday, the lawsuit was filed in Massachusetts state district court and Düsseldorf regional court in Germany and sought unspecified financial damages.

Stéphane Bancel, Moderna’s chief executive, said in a statement that “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.”

The lawsuit, Moderna said, was not meant to stop people from receiving vaccines.

Moderna, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based business, had pioneered the messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine technology that allowed the COVID-19 vaccine to be developed with incredible speed when the coronavirus pandemic started in late 2019 and spread around the world.

Thanks in large part to the development of mRNA vaccines, which instruct human cells on how to produce a protein that would elicit an immune response, an approval procedure that used to take years was finished in months.

It is worth noting that when it teamed up with US pharmaceutical behemoth Pfizer, German company BioNTech was already engaged in this area of research.

Emergency use authorization was granted for COVID-19 vaccines by the US Food and Drug Administration first to PfizerBioNTech, and then a week later Moderna’s authorization came through.

According to Moderna’s claims, Pfizer-BioNTech had copied mRNA technology patented by Moderna between 2010 and 2016 without permission.

In response to the litigation, a Pfizer statement read, “We are surprised by the litigation given the Covid-19 vaccine was based on BioNTech’s proprietary mRNA technology and developed by both BioNTech and Pfizer.”

Moderna further claims that in the early days of the pandemic, it stated that it would not impose its COVID-19 patents in order to help other companies develop their own vaccines. The goal was to assist low- and middle-income countries in the short run to deal with the pandemic.

In March 2022, however, Moderna said it had expected large-scale companies such as Pfizer and BioNTech to respect its intellectual property rights and that it would not seek reparations for any activity conducted prior to March 08, 2022.

On an important fiscal note, Moderna’s COVID vaccine brought $10.4bn in revenue while Pfizer accumulated $22bn in revenue from the vaccine.

Moderna is not the only company filing a lawsuit against the pfizer-BioNTech partnership. Germany’s CureVac, for instance, also filed a lawsuit against them claiming that they infringed on their patents.

Patent litigation is common with new technology.

In addition, Moderna is embroiled in a legal battle with the US National Institutes of Health over mRNA technological rights and has been accused of violating patents there.

Moderna’s statement further stated that “Pfizer and BioNTech took four different vaccine candidates into clinical testing, which included options that would have steered clear of Moderna’s innovative path,” adding that “Pfizer and BioNTech, however, ultimately decided to proceed with a vaccine that has the same exact mRNA chemical modification to its vaccine.”

The coding of a full-length spike protein, which Moderna claims its scientists developed while developing a vaccine for the coronavirus that causes Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (Mers), is the subject of the second alleged infringement.

Despite the fact that the Mers vaccine was never commercialized, Moderna argued that it was able to launch its Covid-19 vaccine quickly thanks to its development.

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