The Hyderabad-based company that had developed Covaxin from the vaccine isolated by the ICMR Institute had not given credit to the ICMR earlier.
Having earlier omitted the Indian Council of Medical Research from Covaxin’s patent application, Bharat Biotech has now claimed that it was an inadvertent error due to the haste with which the patent application was filed. It has now added ICMR as a co-owner, the company said in a statement.
BB had developed the vaccine from the SARS-COV2 virus isolated by the National Institute of Virology, Pune, which is an ICMR institute. That is why the initial omission of the main medical research body in the patent document raised eyebrows.
In its statement, ICMR said: “The development of BBIL’s Covid vaccine faced multiple challenges and all organizations were in a hurry to develop vaccines and file appropriate patents, before any other entity or before any data was published in journals. Bharat Biotech’s Covid vaccine application was submitted in the above circumstances and since the copy of the BBIL-ICMR agreement was not accessible, being a confidential document. Therefore, the ICMR was not included in the original application. Although this was purely inadvertent, such errors are not uncommon in the patent office, which is why the Patent Law makes provisions to rectify such errors.”
The company, in the defensive statement, added that it was working on the development of the COVID-19 vaccine as a top priority to ensure availability of the product as soon as possible. He added: “BBIL has great respect for ICMR and is grateful to ICMR for its continuous support in various projects, therefore, as soon as this inadvertent error was noticed, BBIL has already started the process to rectify it by including ICMR as a co-owner of ICMR . Patent applications for the Covid-19 vaccine. The necessary legal documents are being prepared and BBIL will file them with the patent office as soon as they are ready and signed. These actions are in accordance with the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed between ICMR-NIV Pune and BBIL for joint development of COVID-19 vaccine in April 2020.”
