Moderna Fight With NIH Heating Up Over Covid-19 Vaccine Credit
- NIH wants credit for its scientists on Moderna patent
- NIH said its researchers did the work that led to vaccine
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Moderna Inc. and the National Institutes of Health are embroiled in an unusually public battle over who gets credit for inventions related to the Massachusetts-based company’s Covid-19 vaccine.
The U.S. government is objecting to Moderna listing only company scientists, and not ones from the NIH’s Vaccine Research Center, as inventors on a patent application. Moderna acknowledged the NIH as “collaborators” but in a July filing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that it had made a “good-faith determination that these individuals did not co-invent the mRNAs and mRNA compositions claimed” in the specific application.