Moderna Delays Bid for Covid Shot Patent Disputed by NIH

Director Eldora L. Ellison, Ph.D. was quoted in the article “Moderna Delays Bid for Covid Shot Patent Disputed by NIH,” published by Bloomberg. She commented on the issue of inventorship in the wake of the dispute between Moderna and the National Institutes of Health over Moderna’s efforts to obtain a patent for its Covid-19 vaccine. From the article:

“Determining who should be listed as an inventor is a complicated issue that involves analyzing the specific wording of the patent claims and the work done by individuals, said Eldora Ellison, a biotechnology patent lawyer with Sterne Kessler in Washington, who isn’t involved in the case.

‘Even courts have acknowledged that inventorship is one of the murkiest areas of the law,’ she said in an interview before Moderna’s announcement. ‘We try to understand what happened, factually, and where the ideas underlying the invention came from and think about the intellectual contributions of individuals.'”