Bharat Biotech adds ICMR as co-owner of COVID-19 vaccine patent, Health News, ET HealthWorld

Hyderabad: Bharat Biotech was working on the development of COVID-19 vaccine as top priority to ensure availability of the product at the earliest. BBIL’s Covid vaccine development faced multiple challenges and all organizations were in a hurry to develop vaccines and file appropriate patents, before any other entity or before 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.

BBIL ​​has great respect for ICMR and thanks it 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 the patent applications for 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.