A patent dispute over the Covid-19 vaccine between pharmaceutical firms Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech will be heard in a London court.
The subject of the dispute is the claim by the American company Moderna that its American competitor Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech have infringed the patent right for the Comirnaty vaccine.
Moderna claims it is owed compensation for products manufactured after March 7 last year. But Pfizer and BioNTech deny wrongdoing and want two of Moderna's patents revoked as "invalid."
The hearing will begin at the High Court in London and is expected to last until mid-May. A decision will be made at a later date.
Moderna has filed similar patent infringement claims against Pfizer and BioNTech in other countries as well, notably the US and Germany.
Companies have made billions of dollars from the use of cutting-edge Messenger RNA (mRNA) technology in vaccines.
Such vaccines work by providing genetic instructions to turn some of the host's cells into virus-like particles, which primes the immune system for a response. They were approved within months of the declaration of a global pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020.
In 2020, Moderna said it would not enforce patents related to Covid-19 while the pandemic continues. But in March last year, the company said it expected its intellectual property to be respected in non-low- and middle-income countries, where supply was no longer an issue. /BGNES
