Bharat Biotech International Limited (BBIL) has added the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) as a co-owner of the Covid vaccine patent.
The Hyderabad-based vaccine maker had not included the ICMR in its original patent application for Covaxin, leading to a dispute. In a statement, the company described the omission as “involuntary.”
“Bharat Biotech was working on the development of Covid-19 vaccine as top priority to ensure availability of the product at the earliest. “The development of the Covid vaccine by BBIL 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,” the company said. company.
“Therefore, as soon as this inadvertent error was detected, BBIL has already initiated the process to rectify it by including ICMR as a co-owner of the patent applications for the Covid-19 vaccine,” the statement said.
The company further said that although this was “purely inadvertent”, such errors “are not uncommon in the patent office, which is why the Patent Law provides provisions to rectify such errors.”
The vaccine maker added that it has “great respect for the ICMR and is grateful to the agency for its continued support in various projects.”
The Covid-19 vaccine, Covaxin, was developed by Bharat Biotech in collaboration with the ICMR and the National Institute of Virology (NIV), Pune. SARS CoV2 virus, animal research, viral characterization, testing kits and partial funding for clinical trial locations are examples of the help Bharat Biotech has received from ICMR. An agreement signed in August 2020 said Bharat Biotech has developed Covaxin in collaboration with ICMR and NIV.
A total of 220 million vaccines have been administered in the country, of which 36,39,30,701 were Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin.
