Is BioNTech Reneging on its Commitment to Pay Penn University Royalites for its mRNA Technology?

THE TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, Plaintiffs, v. BIONTECH SE and BIONTECH RNA PHARMACEUTICALS GMBH Defendants.

[Note: This is a recycle from August 2024]

It’s Going to Court in Pennsylvania

Penn University has taken BioNTech to court, see below:

THE TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, Plaintiffs, v. BIONTECH SE and BIONTECH RNA PHARMACEUTICALS GMBH, Defendants.

PRELIMINARY STATEMENT

1. This is an action to compel BioNTech to comply fully with royalty obligations owed to Penn under a patent sublicense agreement that permitted BioNTech to use Penn’s Nobel-prize winning inventions in BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine, Comirnaty®.

2. BioNTech is failing to meet its royalty obligations for two separate reasons. First, BioNTech is paying royalties only for products sold into a country where Penn has a patent, but under the parties’ royalty agreement BioNTech has the obligation to pay a royalty if the patented product is made in a country where Penn has a patent, regardless of where the product is ultimately administered. BioNTech manufactures Comirnaty®—a drug product that uses Penn’s patented mRNA technology—in countries where Penn has patents in force, triggering a royalty on all products. For that reason, BioNTech must pay royalties as a percentage of its entire worldwide sales and not, as it has done to date, on only a portion of its worldwide sales. Second, BioNTech is failing to meet its royalty obligation because it applies an inappropriate deduction for supposed royalties paid to third parties. Under the terms of the parties’ patent sublicense agreement, if BioNTech is obligated to pay royalties to a third party in excess of a specified percentage of its net worldwide sales and provides appropriate documentation to Penn, then it may deduct a portion of certain royalties payable to Penn. But based on the incomplete royalty reports provided to date, BioNTech has never met the threshold necessary to avail itself to a reduction based on royalties paid to third parties.

If the Penn case is proven, what does that say about BioNTech?

If the case is proven, not only has BioNTech launched its experimental, warp speed products on the world, but it will have been ripping off its partners!

Subscribers may remember, I have been calling out BioNTech as a sham company from the start, see:

BioNTech—the virtual company with a virtual moral compass

(note: this is behind a paywall as it goes back a long time).

They called their jabs “Project Lightspeed”

The injections programme was cynically termed ‘Project Lightspeed’ inside the company. We know what that means now—quick and dirty.

There are so many questions to ask about this company now, such as what role are they playing in the Comirnaty supply chain? As holders of the product license, they should be controlling the whole thing.

They are not of course, because they are off chasing phantom cures for cancer etc, to keep the $$s rolling in…

“We are advancing a diversified portfolio of product candidates derived from our four drug classes focused on the potential treatment of cancer, infectious diseases and other serious diseases of unmet patient need:”

Trust me honest subscribers, BioNTech is no more than a website full of lies…

Best, Hedley