Mod­er­na's 'sur­prise' IP court or­der could set up a big set­tle­ment for Roivant, Ar­bu­tus — an­a­lysts

The bat­tle over who owns the patent­ed lipid nanopar­ti­cle tech­nol­o­gy that car­ried the Covid-19 vac­cines across the fin­ish line and in­to mil­lions of peo­ple’s arms re­mains in heat­ed dis­pute. But a new court or­der adds an un­ex­pect­ed twist that could see the mR­NA pow­er­house Mod­er­na pay­ing a hefty sum to set­tle com­plaints from two small­er com­pa­nies that orig­i­nal­ly li­censed the LNP tech to Mod­er­na.

In their orig­i­nal com­plaint, those two com­pa­nies — Ar­bu­tus and Genevant Sci­ences (par­tial­ly owned by Ar­bu­tus and Vivek Ra­maswamy’s Roivant) — ac­knowl­edged that Mod­er­na brought its life-sav­ing Covid vac­cine “from lab bench to arms in record speed,” but that would not have been pos­si­ble with­out the use of Ar­bu­tus’ LNP de­liv­ery plat­form, which “took the sci­en­tists of Ar­bu­tus years of painstak­ing work to de­vel­op and re­fine.”

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