Pfizer (PFE.US), BioNTech (BNTX.US), and Moderna (MRNA.US) seeking to dismiss Bayer's Monsanto mRNA patent lawsuit rejected by judge

The Zhitong Finance App learned that a federal judge in Delaware in the US rejected requests from Pfizer (PFE.US), BioNTech (BNTX.US), and Moderna (MRNA.US) on Monday. The three companies previously requested to dismiss a lawsuit brought against them by Monsanto, a subsidiary of German pharmaceutical giant Bayer, involving the pharmaceutical companies' use of a patent related to mRNA technology.

The patent involved is US Patent No. 7,741,118, which involves enhancing mRNA in crops to enhance the expression of a pesticide-resistant protein. Monsanto alleges in the lawsuit that the companies used this exclusively for their COVID-19 mRNA vaccine “to eliminate 'problematic' coding sequences in cellular building blocks, thereby improving the stability of mRNA and the quantity or quality of proteins produced.”

Monsanto sued these three pharmaceutical companies in court in January of this year, and Johnson & Johnson (JNJ.US) was also sued. The latter is accused of infringing on its patents using a DNA-based process used to produce vaccines.

According to reports, Monsanto, once famous for agricultural science and technology, applied for patent protection for related technology as early as 1989, and was officially approved in 2010. In 2016, Bayer took Monsanto for $66 billion, and this agricultural patent, which seems to be out of touch with medicine, has now become a “powerful tool” for rights protection.

Monsanto initially developed this technology to allow crops to better express insect-resistant proteins, reduce pesticide use, and increase yield. Unexpectedly, in many years it will come in handy in the field of COVID-19 vaccines. When developing the COVID-19 vaccine, scientists faced a major problem: poor mRNA stability led to poor protein expression, which directly affected the immune effects of the vaccine. And Monsanto's technology can solve this pain point — making mRNA more stable by optimizing the coding sequence in cell building blocks, thereby improving protein yield and quality.

Bayer pointed out in the lawsuit that Pfizer/BioNTech has long acknowledged using codon optimization technology in mRNA products, and although Johnson & Johnson's vaccine is a traditional virus vector type, it also requires this technology to enhance mRNA stability to guarantee protein expression. You need to know that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine ComirNaty has recorded sales of more than 93 billion US dollars, which has also brought Bayer's rights protection claims even more attention.

Moderna has argued that the patent relates to a “law of nature” that is not patentable. However, Judge William Bryson said the companies failed to prove that Patent No. 118 was not valid, or that their vaccine did not infringe on that patent.