Aug 27,2022:Moderna has sued 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 filed in the US District Court in Massachusetts. In a news release on Friday, Moderna said the lawsuit would be filed also in the Regional Court of Duesseldorf in Germany.
Moderna said its lawsuit was not meant to stop people from getting vaccines.
Moderna Inc, on its own, and the partnership of Pfizer Inc and BioNTech were two of the first groups to develop a vaccine for the novel coronavirus.
In an emailed statement, a Pfizer spokesperson said: “Pfizer/BioNTech has not yet fully reviewed the complaint but 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.”
“We remain confident in our intellectual property supporting the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and will vigorously defend against the allegations of the lawsuit,” the spokesperson said.
BioNTech did not immediately reply to separate requests for comment.
Just a decade old, 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.
