`Case 1:22-cv-00252-MSG Document 59-10 Filed 03/02/23 Page 1 of 4 PagelD #: 1065
`
`
`
`
`
`EXHIBIT 10
`EXHIBIT 10
`
`
`
`
`
`After Long Delay, Moderna Pays N.I.H. for Covid Vaccine Technique - The New York Times
`2/24/23, 9:29 AM
`Case 1:22-cv-00252-MSG Document 59-10 Filed 03/02/23 Page 2 of 4 PageID #: 1066
`https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/science/moderna-covid-vaccine-patent-nih.html
`
`After Long Delay, Moderna Pays N.I.H. for Covid Vaccine Technique
`Moderna has paid $400 million to the government for a chemical technique key to its vaccine. But the
`parties are still locked in a high-stakes dispute over a different patent.
`
`By Benjamin Mueller
`
`Feb. 23, 2023
`
`5 MIN READ
`
`Sign up for Science Times Get stories that capture the wonders of
`nature, the cosmos and the human body. Get it sent to your inbox.
`
`As Moderna racked up tens of billions of dollars in sales of its coronavirus vaccine, the company held off on
`paying for the rights to a chemical technique that scientists said it had borrowed from government-funded
`research and used in its wildly successful shot.
`
`But Moderna and the government have now reached an agreement. The company said on Thursday that it
`had made a $400 million payment for the technique that will be shared by the National Institutes of Health
`and two American universities where the method was invented.
`
`The payment, disclosed in Moderna’s latest earnings report, represented a small victory for the experts and
`activists who long argued that the company had resisted acknowledging its debt to the government and
`academic researchers.
`
`“If pharmaceutical companies are going to make billions of dollars, it seems reasonable that the scientists
`who helped generate some of the initial intellectual property and the universities also share some of the
`gains,” said Jason McLellan, a structural biologist who in 2017 led efforts to devise the technique in question
`as a researcher at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. “A lot of that will now be reinvested for
`future development and research.”
`
`Moderna is still locked in a separate high-stakes dispute with the N.I.H. over who invented the central
`component of the vaccine, the genetic sequence that helps recipients produce an immune response.
`
`The N.I.H. said its scientists, some of whom had been collaborating for years with Moderna, had helped to
`design that sequence. Moderna also received nearly $10 billion in taxpayer funding to develop and test the
`vaccine, and to provide doses to the federal government. The company has sold roughly $36 billion worth of
`coronavirus vaccines worldwide.
`
`But even as the fight over the sequence attracted public attention, including suggestions from the N.I.H.
`that it might consider legal action, another standoff played out largely in private, this one concerning the
`chemical tweak that was the subject of the payments announced on Thursday.
`
`That technique was integral to a number of coronavirus vaccines, including Moderna’s, scientists said. It
`entailed changing the mRNA code within the vaccines so that they would help people generate an immune
`response to the version of spike proteins present on the surface of the coronavirus before they fused with
`
`https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/science/moderna-covid-vaccine-patent-nih.html
`
`1/3
`
`
`
`After Long Delay, Moderna Pays N.I.H. for Covid Vaccine Technique - The New York Times
`2/24/23, 9:29 AM
`Case 1:22-cv-00252-MSG Document 59-10 Filed 03/02/23 Page 3 of 4 PageID #: 1067
`human cells.
`
`It appeared indisputable to legal experts that government and academic researchers had invented the
`technique. Scientists at Dartmouth, Scripps Research, in California, and the N.I.H. published findings in
`2017 and filed for a patent. A patent was issued in 2021.
`
`Other vaccine makers, too, acknowledged relying on those researchers’ work. By the end of 2021, seven
`pharmaceutical companies had agreed to pay the three institutions for the use of their technique. Among
`them was BioNTech, whose coronavirus vaccine made with Pfizer became the main competitor to
`Moderna’s.
`
`But negotiations with Moderna were slower. The delay in licensing the spike technology became another
`sore point between the company and the government.
`
`“Moderna has benefited richly from government largess, and it does owe a public duty, but it’s been very
`begrudging and slow in acknowledging that public duty,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health
`law at Georgetown University.
`
`Mr. Gostin said the agreement announced on Thursday, which was finalized in December, was “a small
`token in the right direction.”
`
`Chris Ridley, a Moderna spokesman, said in a statement that the company and the government “have been
`engaged in productive discussions since 2020 regarding the licensing of certain patents related to Covid-19
`vaccines.” He added, “It was always our intention to reach an agreement, and we were pleased to have done
`so this past December.”
`
`The N.I.H. did not immediately answer questions about negotiations with Moderna or whether it was still
`awaiting licensing fees from any other vaccine makers.
`
`Under the agreement with Moderna, the company made what it described as a $400 million “catch-up
`payment” to the N.I.H. The government will share that money with Dartmouth and Scripps. The individual
`scientists who helped invent the technique are also likely to receive a portion of the payment, experts said.
`Moderna said the agreement also required royalty payments representing low single-digit percentages of
`future Covid-19 vaccine sales.
`
`The company has forecast Covid vaccine sales of $5 billion for 2023.
`
`The N.I.H. tends to be uneasy about aggressively asserting legal rights to its work, experts said, a stance
`that some activists believe hurts taxpayers who face high prices for medicines developed with government
`funding and research. In the case of the dispute over the spike-protein technique, experts said, the N.I.H.
`was in a particularly tricky position because of its parallel fight over who ultimately invented the vaccine.
`
`That put more of the onus on Dartmouth and Scripps to encourage the government and Moderna to reach
`an agreement. For those institutions, the potential licensing fees represented a significant opportunity to
`pour money into the very same kinds of research that revealed how to modify the spike protein in the first
`place.
`
`“We’re doing it not to benefit shareholders,” said Kim Rosenfield, Dartmouth’s director of technology
`transfer. “This money is going to go right back into the kind of research that enables further lifesaving
`drugs and into educating people.”
`
`https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/science/moderna-covid-vaccine-patent-nih.html
`
`2/3
`
`
`
`After Long Delay, Moderna Pays N.I.H. for Covid Vaccine Technique - The New York Times
`2/24/23, 9:29 AM
`Case 1:22-cv-00252-MSG Document 59-10 Filed 03/02/23 Page 4 of 4 PageID #: 1068
`For a university of Dartmouth’s size, she said, the payments were “game-changing.” Royalty payments for
`an earlier drug developed in part at Dartmouth helped the university set up the research program where
`Dr. McLellan worked, Ms. Rosenfield said. Now the payments for Dr. McLellan’s findings could help
`cultivate future discoveries.
`
`The university said that it had already received $117 million from vaccine makers that had reached earlier
`agreements to license the spike technique.
`
`Dr. McLellan had been working at Dartmouth to respond to an outbreak of an earlier coronavirus — one
`that causes Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS — when he developed the trick for modifying the
`spike. The spikes on the surface of that virus, too, were squirmy and unstable, taking one form before
`invading a cell and another afterward.
`
`Dr. McLellan’s team, working with Dr. Barney Graham at the N.I.H. and Andrew Ward at Scripps, knew that
`the spike needed to be locked in place if it was to elicit the strongest possible immune response. After
`several attempts failed, they zeroed in on a particularly loose joint of the spike and added two stiff amino
`acids, a tweak that made the entire thing more rigid.
`
`Philip Hanlon, the president of Dartmouth, said that it had been a “thrilling moment” when the research
`had been harnessed for the coronavirus vaccines. Ensuring that the university and its scientists were paid
`for the work, he said, would set the stage for future research, especially experiments risky and uncertain
`enough that pharmaceutical companies would generally not think it worthwhile to carry them out
`themselves.
`
`“I think this gives you a model for partnerships where the basic, curiosity-based research did happen on a
`campus, and led to eventually creating a product which saved millions of lives,” he said.
`
`https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/science/moderna-covid-vaccine-patent-nih.html
`
`3/3
`
`