The University of Pennsylvania is bringing BioNTech to court over royalties the school believes it’s owed on the company’s Pfizer-partnered Covid vaccine.
In a lawsuit filed Monday, Penn alleged that BioNTech hasn’t been meeting its royalty obligations under a sublicense agreement that gave it access to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman’s Nobel Prize-winning discoveries around mRNA vaccines. The university maintained that those inventions were “instrumental in the creation of a vaccine for Covid-19.”
The complaint accuses BioNTech of only paying royalties on a portion of worldwide sales, and Penn argues that it owes royalties on all sales. The university also said BioNTech is inappropriately applying a deduction that it “has never met the threshold” to qualify for, “based on the incomplete royalty reports provided to date.” Pfizer reported $11.2 billion in 2023 Comirnaty sales.
BioNTech denied the claims in a statement to Endpoints News on Wednesday, adding that it intends to “vigorously defend ourselves.”
“BioNTech’s guiding principle in collaborations is generally driven by mutual respect and fairness, which is why we have been in discussions with the University of Pennsylvania regarding royalties for over a year,” a spokesperson said.
The lawsuit adds to a series of patent disputes involving Pfizer and BioNTech’s Covid vaccine, including a drawn-out legal battle with Moderna and a suit filed by GSK earlier this year. Pfizer is not named as a defendant in Penn’s case.