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Comment by Kliment | Hacker News Reader

NIH (a US government run institution) holds the main patents on mRNA technology.

I thought it is the German couple behind mRNA, no? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/business/biontech-covid-v... https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-020-00119-8

The NIH has claims on the 2P mutation in the spike that appears to make it better. Cellscript holds the N1mPsi patent (may not be essential, watch for CureVac p3 read out soon). The ionizable lipids currently have composition of matter coverage for a few companies, which is probably the crux of the discussion. Everything else is confidential know-how, which is already scaling as fast. I'm not sure exactly what this gets anyone...

No, the NIH helped with the spike protein sequence. There are plenty of other parents needed to make the actual vaccine.

If you are knowledgeable on this, please could you write a short list of the total amount of patents the vaccine currently consists of, or link to a good source?

That’s not easy information to get. Startups pay a lot of money to do a “freedom to operate” study to see what patents are out there and who owns what. You can pay companies for high level info, but it’s not easy at all.

You did say

> There are plenty of other parents needed to make the actual vaccine

So asking for the other patents involved is a reasonable question, especially since your assertion presumably involves knowing - at least vaguely - what said patents might be.

This is good summary of the intellectual property situation for mRNA vaccine. The link was posted 2 weeks ago on the Twitter stream of Katalin Kariko, pioneer of mRNA vaccine technology and VP at BioNTech.

https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2021/04/11/mrna-ip-competitive-la...

https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2021/04/21/mrna-ip-competitive-la...

https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2021/04/30/mrna-patent-competitiv...

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