Moderna said on Feb. 23 that it recently reached a patent agreement with the U.S. government over disputed technology that is featured in its COVID-19 vaccine.
In December 2022, Moderna entered “a nonexclusive patent license agreement” with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), said CFO Jamey Mock during an earnings call on Thursday.
The agreement lets the company use “certain patent rights concerning stabilizing prefusion coronavirus spike proteins and the resulting stabilized proteins for the use in COVID-19 vaccine products,” Mock said.
Under the agreement, Moderna sent a “catch-up payment” of $400 million to the NIAID before the new year, according to Moderna executives.
“We have agreed to pay low single-digit royalties on future net sales of our COVID-19 vaccines,” Mock said.
NIAID and its parent agency, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), did not respond to requests for comment.
The Epoch Times has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the agreement.
NIAID was headed for decades by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who retired around the end of 2022.
The disclosure means the government was paid shortly before telling a court that it, not Moderna, should face a lawsuit over patent infringement.
NIH Says Wrongly Left Off Patent
U.S. government researchers were wrongly left off of a patent filing for a key sequence that’s part of the vaccine, according to government officials.
NIH scientists were working with Moderna for four years on vaccines for diseases before the pandemic started. After COVID-19 emerged, the NIH and Moderna collaborated to develop the COVID-19 vaccine, both parties have said.
But the messenger RNA sequence “was selected exclusively by Moderna scientists using Moderna’s technology and without input of NIAID scientists, who were not even aware of the mRNA sequence until after the patent application had already been filed,” Moderna said in one statement.
NIH officials and Moderna were negotiating over the matter when Moderna said in a patent application that it “reached a good-faith determination” that government scientists did not invent the messenger RNA sequence.
An NIH review concluded that doctors Kizzmekia Corbett, Barney Graham, and John Mascola, who all worked with Moderna while at the NIH, co-invented the sequence, a government official familiar with the situation told The Epoch Times previously.
“The work of Dr. Barney Graham and Kizzmekia Corbett and others stabilized the prefusion spike protein which is used in virtually all, with few exceptions, of the vaccines that are now successful,” Fauci told one congressional hearing.
The scientists were named on several related patents, but not the sequence one.
Moderna changed its stance in December 2021, announcing it was abandoning, at least temporarily, its pursuit of the sequence patent.
“Moderna has taken this action to allow more time for discussions with the NIH. Moderna believes that its scientists invented the specific mRNA sequence at the heart of the patent in question. The company acknowledges that NIH feels equally strongly that its scientists should be listed as co-inventors for their contemporaneous work on the protein sequence,” Moderna said at the time.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-government-received-400-million-in-covid-19-vaccine-royalty-payments-moderna_5078600.html