Source: Reuters

This month, the German-Dutch laboratory CureVac filed a lawsuit in the German Regional Court in Düsseldorf against fellow German BioNTech and two of its subsidiaries. The preceding is due to an alleged infringement of patents for using messenger RNA (mRNA) technology.

The CureVac intellectual property portfolio protects several inventions essential to the design and development of BioNTech’s mRNA SARSCoV-2 vaccines. These refer to the technique of producing mRNA molecules. Sequence modifications to increase stability and improve protein expression are also included. As well as the formulation of the specific mRNA vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 vaccines.

For this reason, through a statement, CureVac highlights that in the lawsuit filed, it requested fair compensation for the violation of a certain number of intellectual property rights, which contributed not only to the creation but also to the rapid development of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2.

In this way, and due to the significant increase in cases of SARS-CoV-2 that several countries have presented in recent months, CureVac assured that it did not want its legally undertaken actions to hinder the production, sale, or distribution of vaccines. BioNTech and its partner (Pfizer).

In this context, BioNTech has stated that it is exploring all legal options, reiterating that its work is original, and that it will defend it against all objections of patent infringement.

It is worth remembering that the vaccine promoted by BioNTech, developed in an agreement with the American Pfizer, was one of the first to reach the market, along with Moderna and AstraZeneca, and it is also the most widely used in the world. Last year it added around 33,000 million euros in revenue. BioNTech expects 17,000 million in sales of this product.

Its rival CureVac gave up on bringing to market the first version of the vaccine it prepared from messenger RNA after the rapid expansion of the different alternative pharmaceutical laboratories.

In the current pandemic scenario, BioNTech is not the first to face accusations of patent infringement regarding SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. Earlier this year, Arbutus Biopharma and Genevant Sciences filed a patent infringement lawsuit in federal court in Delaware, United States, against Moderna.

Both disputed patents involve so-called lipid nanoparticles enclosing the genetic material, which is known as messenger RNA (mRNA) in the vaccine.