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Vaccine maker Moderna has forked over $400 million to the National Institutes of Health for using a molecular stabilizing technique borrowed from government and academic researchers in its mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine—which the company made roughly $36 billion selling amid the deadly pandemic, according to The New York Times.
Moderna mentioned the payment in the company's latest earnings report, which described the sum as a "catch-up payment" negotiated with the NIH in December as part of a new royalty-bearing license agreement. The agreement will also grant the NIH "low single-digit royalties on future COVID-19 vaccine sales." The company expects to make around $5 billion in COVID-19 vaccine sales in 2023.
The molecular technique at the center of the agreement is designed to stabilize the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein so that it can spur a strong immune response following vaccination. The mRNA-based vaccine delivers genetic code for the spike protein, which is then translated by human cells into protein. Researchers at the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)—as well as collaborators at Dartmouth and The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California—came up with a method of tweaking the mRNA code so that, when translated, the spike protein would stay locked in a specific conformation best for generating an immune response. They had developed the technique years before the pandemic, publishing it in a 2017 study involving the spike protein from a SARS-CoV-2 relative, MERS-CoV, aka the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus. Moderna began collaborating with the NIAID on a general design for mRNA-based vaccines in 2016, but none of its scientists were authors of the 2017 paper.
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source https://arstechnica.com/?p=1920085