As Russia announces Covid-19 vaccine, Moderna Uncertain About Exclusivity

While the world is struggling to develop a cure against the coronavirus, our hopes are pitted against Moderna, AstraZeneca, and Oxford for developing a COVID-19 vaccine. These three vaccines along with the Chinese coronavirus vaccines are the only ones that have reached the Phase-III of human trials. This phase of the human trials will basically test the efficacy and safety of the coronavirus vaccines before they are declared fit for administration and are launched in the market. 

In the quarterly filing report on August 6, the U.S. drug developer Moderna said, there’s a possibility that it’s not the first company to make major breakthroughs in the patient application aspect of the vaccines. Moderna said that this statement is also true for its coronavirus vaccine candidate. However, the point to note here is that Moderna’s prior filings with the U.S. regulators did not have any disclosures of such sort.

Moderna said, “For this and other reasons we may be unable to secure the desired patient rights, thereby losing exclusivity.” The pharmaceutical company had received nearly $1 billion as an investment from the U.S. government. In July, it lost a bid to navigate the U.S. patent that was owned by Arbutus Biopharma Corp. This poses a potential threat to Moderna’s efforts to develop quality next-generation vaccines.

The company further said, “We cannot be certain that we were the first to make the inventions claimed in our patents or pending patent applications, or that we were the first to file for patent protection of such inventions, including mRNA-1273.” Furthermore, the White House said on Tuesday that it has already signed a deal with Moderna to supply 100 million doses of its potential COVID-19 vaccine to Americans. The U.S. government has invested $1.5 billion dollars for the deal and even further doses will be supplied by Moderna as required by the country.