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Biontech vaccine Comirnaty: dispute with the competition
Photo: Bernd Wüstneck / dpa
The biotech company Biontech is filing a lawsuit in the USA in a patent dispute with its competitor Curevac.
The Mainz-based company announced that Biontech and its US partner Pfizer had filed a declaratory action with the federal district court in Massachusetts.
The two companies wanted to obtain a ruling that three of Curevac's US patents were not infringed by their Covid-19 vaccine Comirnaty.
Rather, it is based on Biontech's proprietary mRNA technology.
The Tübingen-based biotech company Curevac announced earlier this month that it saw its patents being infringed by Biontech's vaccine, which has sold billions of times, and had therefore filed a lawsuit against the company and two Biontech subsidiaries at the Düsseldorf Regional Court.
Curevac is demanding "fair compensation" for the infringement of a number of its intellectual property rights used in the manufacture and sale of Comirnaty by Biontech and Pfizer.
Biontech had rejected the allegations and announced that it would examine all legal options after Curevac's lawsuit.
When the lawsuit was announced, Curevac had stated that the alleged infringement of its patents had been known for a long time.
"At the peak of the pandemic, none of us would have thought of pointing out the patent infringement," the company said at the time.
Curevac was considered one of the great hopes in the development of a Covid-19 vaccine, but suffered a serious setback because its own vaccine did not work as well as hoped - the project was stopped.
The company then lost massively in value on the stock exchange.
Biontech, together with its US partner Pfizer, has made billions in sales with its corona vaccine.
mmq/Reuters