As pressure grows on the large pharmaceutical industry to relax its patent policy and thus facilitate mass vaccination of poor countries, a second war on intellectual property is raging in laboratories and high offices. This time the dispute is between the public and private partners that have collaborated in the creation of Moderna’s vaccine, that is, the American firm Moderna Therapeutics and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the great public machinery for biomedical research. North American.
The reason for the discomfort is quite simple: the public researchers did not sign the patent application, despite being co-inventors of the drug. Since Moderna expects to earn 18,000 million dollars (16,000 million euros) this year with the sales of its vaccine, the neglect It is going to be expensive for American public science. The NIH will lose, or will stop entering, money that would have allowed them to license the patent under conditions advantageous to developing countries. It is not just altruism. The current threat of the omicron variant it shows how much rich countries have to lose by not providing enough doses to the rest of the world.
Moderna’s (or better, Moderna / NIH) vaccine is one of two that use the groundbreaking messenger RNA technique (mRNA), which contains the information for human cells to make a modified version of the viral spike protein. As Heidi Ledford reports for Nature, these modifications make the protein more immunogenic, so that it stimulates the production of antibodies in the patient’s body. And they were designed and introduced by NIH public scientists, who were already proficient in previous work with other coronaviruses. The NIH proposed three of its researchers as co-inventors in the key patent application, but Moderna excluded them in the paperwork.
An unwritten norm in these types of collaborations is that public institutes take care of the initial phases of the research and then pass the results to the industry for development. Public science thus assumes the risk of betting on lines of research that do not ultimately lead to profitable applications, a contingency that the private sector usually considers dissuasive. In return, the industry invests heavily when it sees a promising line from its public partners, who often do not have the hundreds of millions of euros required to develop the product and organize clinical trials.
That unspoken protocol, however, has begun to be questioned in recent years, even before the pandemic. The current Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris, included in her electoral campaign the initiative that the Government press to enforce the intellectual property of public research. One reason is that this would give it a voice in setting the prices of drugs that result from public / private collaboration. In the case of covid, that advantage would extend to strategic decisions to license vaccines to developing countries.
What now affects the Moderna / NIH vaccine may have an expansive effect on other star vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, which are also the product of public / private collaboration. If omicron requires the design of new vaccines, the question is pressing.
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