COVID-19 treatments to enter the market with a hefty price tag

[BumRushDaShow]

12. LOL no...

In reference to your link - like many R&D efforts - you will have both colleges and universities (like what was in your link pointing to researchers here in Philly at Penn) apply for research grants or similarly, individuals or groups conducting R&D at various product manufacturers (drugs, devices, cosmetics, biologics, etc) can apply for NIH grants.

In fact, with respect to the Penn researchers who ended up winning Nobel prizes at the beginning of this month, they were having difficulty getting their work off the ground and getting grants.

Neither work for pharma companies, but they evolved the concept of the practical use of mRNA for vaccines.

The closet involvement that the government had (including actually participating in partnership with the R&D) was for Moderna's vaccine AND the feds obtained patents for the work that was done in the development, including what would be the sequencing techniques to actually use mRNA in a viable, safe and effective vaccine.

That is of course when a dispute occurred when Moderna tried to cash in and leave their benefactors (and co-patent-holders) out. I just found one update on that -

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


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.

(snip)

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/science/moderna-covid-vaccine-patent-nih.html

No paywall (gift)

Dr. Fauci was actually personally involved in the above with the partnership between the feds (immunologists and vaccine researchers working under his office in NIAID) and Moderna. Because of that (and my being a retired fed labby) that is why I went with Moderna for what has now been 6 shots (my most recent one being this past Wednesday).

Moderna received an official full approval of its BLA (Biologic License Application) for "Spikevax" (their brand name for it) last year.

But note that the federal government isn't cranking out batches of vaccine nor purchasing vials, stoppers or labels for them, etc., nor has production facilities with filling machines or temperature-controlled storage freezers/warehouses to store finished products. And because the variants change in circulation throughout the year, the manufacturers have to determine what is circulating and likely to still be in circulation once the vaccine is ready for distribution (generally in the fall), go through the re-sequence of the base entity, and then test that for effectiveness in mini-trials, etc.

So there is an ongoing cost associated with manufacturing, Q&A testing, and periodic revisions of batches.

And in this case, other than grants to Pfizer, Novavax, and Janssen/J&J (now pulled) and GSK (also pulled), etc., who were part of or later participants in that "Operation Warp Speed" thing, the other companies generally did their own thing.

One of the biggest issues the government has had with pharma is their overall REFUSAL to invest in and manufacture vaccines because in the scheme of their product sales, they are generally considered "loss leaders" and the government has usually had to beg them to make them. COVID-19 turned the tables on that sentiment due to the pandemic being a global nightmare with a significant need. But as interest in COVID-19 wanes globally (even if the virus hasn't done so), it's something that they are going to try to milk as long as they can before this type of product fades into the background along with the other vaccines, with an uptake only by a small fraction of the world populace.