Tuesday, July 26, 2022

BioNTech, Pfizer file complaint against CureVac in District of Massachusetts, seeking declaratory judgment of non-infringement of three mRNA patents

This is the first time for FOSS Patents to report on a life sciences case--a first that is warranted by the extraordinary significance of the related dispute. Less than three weeks after CureVac, a biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Germany and funded by (inter alia) SAP co-founder Dietmar Hopp, announced its Dusseldorf patent infringement action against BioNTech over the alleged use of foundational mRNA-related patents in the latter's COVID vaccine (named Comirnaty), BioNTech and its strategic partner Pfizer filed a declaratory judgment action in the District of Massachussetts taking aim at three of CureVac's U.S. patents.

While BioNTech and Pfizer need no introduction anywhere in the civilized world, there as a time when politicians were bullish about the prospects of CureVac delivering one of the first COVID vaccines--if not the first. Then-President Trump even offered a funding bonanza to CureVac--in exchange for which the company would have had to relocate to the U.S. at least with respect to its work on a coronavirus vaccine. Alarmed by those overtures, the German federal government became minority shareholder, and the European Commission--together with the European Investment Bank--entered into a financing agreement with CureVac. In the end, CureVac wasn't among the winners of the race, though the company is working on a next-generation COVID vaccine that may ultimately be approved.

The question on which it is still too early for me to take a position is whether CureVac is a "sore loser" who is now attempting a patent shakedown of the glorious winner of the race to the first truly effective COVID vaccine--or whether BioNTech was "standing on the shoulders of giants" from the get-go, in which case CureVac would clearly be entitled to substantial compensation. It is potentially a multi-billion dollar question, and it would be wrong to harbor prejudice toward one party or the other, as the idea of patent law is not to reward success in the marketplace but to incentivize research and development. It's not a ball game where you just count the goals. It's a lot more complex and nuanced than that. Simply put, if CureVac made a wrong call in its COVID vaccine development, but had the right vision before BioNTech even started to develop Comirnaty, then its case may be perfectly meritorious and patent law may then be more meritocratic than the marketplace. We just don't know yet.

Here's the U.S. complaint:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22121278-22-07-25-pfizer-biontech-dj-non-infr-complaint-v-curevac

CureVac's German complaint is not seeking an injunction--just fair compensation. CureVac emphasized that it never intended to disrupt the development or delivery of COVID vaccines in the midst of a pandemic, and that the company waited even with its complaint for monetary relief until this point. That makes sense.

At the same time, Pfizer and BioNTech have made a strategically very smart move, too:

  • With its narrative that portrays CureVac as a sore loser (without using that term), the complaint is directed not only at the court of law (and the jury to be selected further down the road) but also at the court of public opinion.

  • Pfizer is headquartered in New York but has a home-field advantage anywhere in the United States, and BioNTech has one of its two U.S. offices in the Bay State--and that's where CureVac's U.S. office is based, so it would be hard for CureVac to get the case transferred to another district.

    As a cross-jurisdictional patent litigation watcher I don't agree with CureVac's choice to bring only a Dusseldorf case. If CureVac had brought the first U.S. case as well, it could have tried to pick the most favorable district. Some of the preferred districts for patent holders (Eastern District of Texas, Western District of Texas, Eastern District of Virginia) would probably not have been defensible choices as they are merely target markets for Pfizer and BioNTech just like, say, the Southern District of Alabama. But CureVac could have sued in the Southern District of New York (Pfizer HQ), which has recently also been a pretty good venue for patent holders to assert their rights, or in the District of Delaware (Pfizer is a Delaware corporation, as are possibly other parties).

  • Pfizer and BioNTech are seeking declarations of non-infringement, not of invalidity. That makes sense for two reasons: U.S. juries are very hard to persuade of invalidity contentions, and when you are already being sued in Germany and don't know whether the patentee may at some point throw in an additional prayer for injunctive relief, any determinations by foreign courts that confirm the validity of the patents-in-suit will dissuade a German court from staying the infringement proceedings pending a local invalidity action. Should Pfizer and BioNTech have reasonably meritorious invalidity arguments, they might instead file for PTAB inter partes reviews.

At this point it looks like Pfizer-BioNTech is the more sophisticated side here, which may be attributable to Pfizer's ample experience more than anything else. But litigation tactics won't prove decisive in the event that CureVac truly did pioneer mRNA-related technologies relevant to mRNA-based COVID vaccines.

It also remains to be seen whether CureVac will enforce its intellectual property rights against other COVID vaccine makers, which would be the logical thing to happen if CureVac's patents are truly mRNA-essential, and whether other companies holding mRNA-related patents will sue BioNTech and/or Pfizer.