American drugmaker Pfizer and German biotech company BioNTech have agreed to pay Britain’s GSK and Germany’s CureVac a total of \$740 million plus royalties to settle legal disputes in the United States over COVID-19 vaccines, CureVac said on Friday.
The royalties will be a “single-digit” percentage of COVID-19 vaccine sales in the US, according to CureVac.
CureVac also said it will give Pfizer and BioNTech a non-exclusive license to make and sell mRNA-based COVID-19 and flu vaccines in the United States.
GSK, which has been working with CureVac since 2020 to develop mRNA vaccines for infectious diseases, will get \$370 million and a 1% royalty on US sales of flu, COVID-19, and related mRNA combination vaccines.
CureVac took BioNTech to court in 2022, claiming the company had copied its mRNA technology patents to make the Comirnaty COVID-19 vaccine in partnership with Pfizer.
Unlike traditional vaccines, which use dead or inactivated viruses, mRNA vaccines use genetic instructions to tell human cells to make proteins found in the targeted virus.
Because no live virus needs to be grown in a lab, mRNA vaccines can be developed much faster than conventional vaccines.
The Pfizer-BioNTech shot was the first mRNA vaccine ever approved and the first COVID-19 vaccine to get approval in Western countries.
CureVac also tried to make an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine during the pandemic, but its efforts did not succeed.
This new deal ends the US legal fight between CureVac and BioNTech, just before BioNTech’s planned takeover of CureVac, announced in June.
The two companies are still fighting in German courts, but CureVac said the agreement “creates a basis” to settle patent disputes outside the US.
In March, a German court ruled in favour of US drugmaker Moderna, saying BioNTech and Pfizer had violated one of Moderna’s patents in making their COVID-19 vaccine.
