Posts Tagged: "mRNA vaccines"

The People’s Vaccine Alliance, a coalition of over 100 organizations, issued a statement this week alleging that the pharmaceutical industry is attempting to tighten its control of the world’s pandemic response plans. In the statement, the organization argues that “enshrining pharmaceutical companies’ demands in a pandemic treaty or other pandemic preparedness plans would normalize global inequalities and tie the hands of governments in future health crises.” The Alliance released the statement in response to the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations’ (IFPMA) July statement titled the Berlin Declaration – Biopharmaceutical Industry Vision for Equitable Access in Pandemics during the World Health Summit, where stakeholders from politics, science, the private sector, and civil society gathered in Berlin from October 16-18.

Moderna has sued Pfizer and BioNTech over the mRNA vaccine patents behind the COVID-19 vaccines. Moderna is not seeking to remove Comirnaty® from the market and is not asking for an injunction to prevent future sale, nor damages related to Pfizer’s sales for any COVID-19 vaccine used in 92 low- and middle-income countries. Moderna is represented by Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr. The patents asserted in the complaint filed in the District of Massachusetts are: U.S. Patent Nos. 10,898,574 (the “’574 patent”), 10,702,600 (the “’600 patent”), and 10,933,127 (the “’127 patent”).

June marked the 40th anniversary of the first reported AIDS case. On the anniversary, UNAIDS released a strategy to end HIV/AIDS by 2030, a goal that seemed unthinkable over 40 years ago. Yet since 1981, the innovative scientific community has delivered a series of treatments that revolutionized the outlook for HIV/AIDS patients. Those early days of 1981 were not unlike what we experienced with coronavirus last spring. Hospitals began to see cases of a mysterious pneumonia with few options for how to treat it, just as physicians across the country struggled to identify effective treatments for COVID-19 patients last March. Indeed, Dr. Anthony Fauci – who dedicated 40 years of his career to combatting HIV/AIDS – recalled “the first few years were the darkest years of my medical career, because I was working countless hours taking care of desperately ill young men.”

In Part I of this three-part series, we focused on three market players: BioNTech, Moderna and CureVac. In this second post, we will focus on Translate BIO, Arcturus Therapeutics, and eTheRNA and discuss certain issues relating to lipid nanoparticle (LNP) delivery technology. Translate Bio, Inc. (NASDAQ: TBIO) is headquartered in Lexington, MA, and as of April 2021, has a market capitalization of over $1.3 billion. According to its website, Translate BIO’s mRNA product pipeline is directed to several indications including cystic fibrosis, primary ciliary dyskinesia, pulmonary arterial hypertension, COVID-19, influenza, viral pathogens, and bacterial pathogens. The company does not presently have any products on the market. However, it has one cystic fibrosis candidate and one COVID-19 vaccine candidate (with Sanofi) that are both in Phase 1/2 clinical trials. Translate BIO also appears to have one infectious disease candidate in the “IND-enabling” Phase (with Sanofi), and three lung candidates, one liver candidate, and two infectious disease candidates (with Sanofi) in the discovery phase.