Thursday, November 11, 2021

Just to catch up on what is going on with the Moderna/NIH patent dispute. It has been very clear from the very beginning that there was a very strong collaboration between investigators at the Vaccine Research Center (VRC) and the Moderna company . In particular John Mascola , Barney Graham, and Kizzmekia Corbett were heavily involved in the development of the mRNA -1273 vaccine. It was assumed by everyone that there would be a joint patent inventorship. And so, when a few months ago we heard that there was some disagreement among the tech transfer people of the NIH and the lawyers at Moderna, Frances and I engaged in a couple of telephone conversations with Steve Hoge and Stephane Bancef of Moderna. Steve and Stephane said that the actual inventorship was solely Moderna and that although the NIH had rights to the patent and licensing of the S2P immunogen, Moderna claimed that the actual “inventorship” was theirs. This is critical since even though we would get a considerable amount of royalty from this technicality and even though we could be “co-owners” of the patent but not inventors of the patent this would still give Moderna complete control over who can or cannot use the mRNA vaccine . This is particularly relevant if we try to get the vaccine produced for low and middle income countries at a very, very low price. And so, after many attempts at resolving the issue we were very surprised that Moderna unilaterally went out and filed the patent and specifically and explicitly excluded John, Barney, and Kizzy. The entire academic community, when they found out about this, was totally taken aback. And so, just this week Francis made it clear in an interview with Reuters that we are going to bring Moderna to court and let the courts determined the outcome . See below. UPDATE 1-Moderna COVID-19 vaccine patent dispute headed to court, U.S. NIH head says By Julie Steenhuysen Science magazine has written a critical appraisal of NIH and it has really pissed off Francis Collins: Editorial Self-inflicted wounds H. Holden Thorp Science • 11 Nov 2021 • Vol 374, Issue 6569 • p. 793 • DOI: 10.1126/science.abn1244 • 0eLetters