Dr. Nicholas Jones, partner and patent attorney at Withers & Rogers, discusses what the pharma industry can learn from its experiences of working collaboratively during the COVID-19 pandemic by establishing best practice and minimising the risk of legal disputes in the future.
Key insights:
- Pharma industry experts are calling for greater preparedness and a framework for pandemic-related licence agreements to avoid future disputes.
- Moderna is seeking to impose a ‘commercially reasonable licence’ on third parties that have profited from vaccines developed using its proprietary mRNA technology.
- A legal framework for sharing patented technologies under licence during a pandemic could help to speed up decision making and facilitate better and fairer outcomes in the future.
News that Moderna is suing Pfizer-BioNTech for infringement of its patent rights when producing a vaccine for use during the COVID-19 pandemic has shocked some industry commentators. Legal disputes of this kind are quite rare between pharma innovators, with most tussles in the industry normally involving at least one generics producer. So, what went wrong here?