Status: 05.07.2022 17:54
The Tübingen pharmaceutical company CureVac has filed a lawsuit against the corona vaccine manufacturer BioNTech. CureVac seeks compensation for patent infringement by BioNTech. The Corona vaccine brought in billions for BioNTech.
The Tübingen-based biotech company CureVac sees its patents being infringed by competitor BioNTech’s corona vaccine, which has sold billions of times. CureVac has therefore filed a lawsuit against BioNTech and two subsidiaries of the Mainz-based company at the Düsseldorf Regional Court, the company announced.
“Fair compensation” demanded
CureVac is demanding “fair compensation” for the violation of a number of its intellectual property rights used in the manufacture and sale of the Covid-19 vaccine Comirnaty by BioNTech and its US partner Pfizer. “Many years of our research have also contributed to the success of the mRNA vaccines and made them possible,” said CEO Franz-Werner Haas.
Haas did not say what amount CureVac envisages. This must be clarified in the process. The parties disagree on this issue after numerous discussions.
However, CureVac does not want to prevent the sale of BioNTech vaccines
The Tübingen-based company says it is not seeking an injunction and does not intend to take legal action that could hinder the production, sale or distribution of the BioNTech vaccine Comirnaty. The company has approached BioNTech, which has “the greatest respect” for the rapid vaccine development, said Haas. CureVac deliberately filed the lawsuit only now, “because other things naturally had priority at the height of the Corona crisis.” But now the right time has come for a legal clarification of this question. Previous talks with BioNTech about the four patents that CureVac sees as being infringed have not led to an agreement.
BioNTech initially did not want to comment, but announced a statement. The federal government, which holds around 16 percent of CureVac, did not want to comment on the patent dispute. The dispute is one of the first known cases of a company going to court after the race to develop a corona vaccine.
Company wants to develop new vaccine
After a promising start in mid-2021, CureVac failed to bring a corona vaccine onto the market and now wants to be a pioneer in the development of a new second-generation vaccine with its British partner GlaxoSmithKline. A clinical study of the new candidate was started at the end of March.
Also lawsuit against Moderna?
Haas did not want to say whether CureVac is also planning a lawsuit against the US biotech group Moderna, but did not rule it out. This is part of the company’s patent strategy, to which he cannot comment. The Moderna vaccine is also based on messenger RNA (mRNA), which is intended to convey the information to human cells to fight pathogens.