BioNTech has entered into two separate settlement agreements with the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the University of Pennsylvania regarding royalty payments for its COVID-19 vaccine.
The vaccine maker will pay $791.5 million to the NIH to resolve a default notice and $467 million to UPenn to dismiss a lawsuit, Reuters reported.
BioNTech said its partner, Pfizer, will reimburse it for $364.5 million of the royalties to NIH for 2020-2023 vaccine sales and up to $170 million to the university.
The lawsuit from the University of Pennsylvania said that the vaccine developer owes it a greater share of its vaccine sales due to its use of mRNA, developed by the university’s professors and Nobel Prize winners Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman.
Both settlements provide a “framework for a license to use NIH and Penn’s patents in combination products,” the report noted.
A report from the investigative group Open the Books found that scientists with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were paid around $710 million from big pharma groups during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The NIH collected $710 million in royalties between 2021 through 2023 from pharmaceutical and healthcare companies.
“These were payments to NIH, its leadership and scientists by healthcare entities licensing inventions created in federal, taxpayer-paid labs,” Adam Andrezejewski, founder of Open the Books, wrote.
Prior to this period, the average payment made to the NIH from healthcare organizations was less than $5 million.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) also extended an “emergency preparedness” declaration that protects vaccine manufacturers from liability through 2029.
“COVID-19 continues to present a credible risk of a future public health emergency,” HHS Secretary Xavier Beccera claimed. “COVID-19 continues to cause significant serious illness, morbidity, and mortality during outbreaks. The risk of domestic cases is high due to ongoing outbreaks that continue domestically and internationally in the year since the PHE for COVID-19 ended.”
“Development of and stockpiling vaccines, therapeutics, devices, and diagnostics for COVID-19 continues to be needed for U.S. preparedness against the credible threat of a public health emergency due to outbreaks of COVID-19,” he added.
