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Vaccine collaborators are locked in a high-stakes dispute over which researchers should be named as inventors on a key patent application.
It was a testament to the power of collaboration: scientists at the biotechnology firm Moderna Therapeutics teamed up with government researchers at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to swiftly produce one of the world's first successful COVID-19 vaccines.
But a boiling patent dispute between the collaborators also showcases the complexities of teamwork, as the two groups battle over whether NIH researchers were unfairly left off as co-inventors on a pivotal vaccine patent application.
The stakes are high. Moderna, which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has projected that it will make up to US$18 billion on its COVID-19 vaccine this year. Inventor status could enable the NIH to collect royalties - potentially recouping some of its investment of taxpayer money - and to license the patent as it sees fit, including to competing vaccine makers in low- and middle-income countries, where vaccines are still painfully scarce.
Nature looks at four key questions about the patent spat and its potential ripple effects for collaborations between government and industry.
What are Moderna and the NIH fighting about?
Before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the NIH and Moderna collaborated on the development of vaccines for other coronaviruses. So, when the news of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak reached them, it was only natural that they work together on producing a vaccine.
The vaccine they created contains messenger RNA that encodes a modified form of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. The modifications were intended to hold the protein in a stable conformation that was deemed likely to trigger an immune response. The NIH has stated in the past that these modifications were developed by researchers at its National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and other collaborators, and it described analogous modifications in another coronavirus in 2017 (J. Pallesen et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 114, E7348-E7357; 2017).
In drug and vaccine development, it is common for inventors to file multiple patents - often dozens or more - to cover different aspects of a single product. Moderna has filed several patent applications on its COVID-19 vaccine that name NIH investigators as co-inventors.
But some of its patent applications do not,...