Bharat Biotech adds ICMR as co-owner of Covid-19 vaccine patent

Hyderabad: Bharat Biotech has announced that it has added the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) as the co-owner of the Covid-19 vaccine patent.

It said that it was an unintentional oversight that led to ICMR’s name not being included in the original application which has been rectified now.

Explaining the 'rush' in the vaccine development process at the onset of Covid-19 pandemic, Bharat Biotech said, “Bharat Biotech was working on developing the Covid-19 vaccine as a top priority to ensure product availability at the earliest. The Covid vaccine development of BBIL was faced with multiple challenges and all organisations were in a rush to develop vaccines and file the appropriate patents, prior to any other entity or prior to any data being published in journals.”

“Bharat Biotech’s Covid vaccine application was filed in the above circumstances and since the BBIL-ICMR agreement copy, being a confidential document, was not accessible. Hence ICMR was not included in the original application. Though this was purely unintentional, such mistakes are not uncommon for the Patent office therefore Patent Law provides provisions to rectify such mistakes,” it added.

Stating that BBIL has great respect for ICMR and is thankful for its continuous support on various projects, Bharat Biotech said that as soon as the inadvertent mistake was noticed, BBIL immediately started the process to rectify it by including ICMR as co-owner of the patent applications for Covid-19 vaccine.

Necessary legal documents are being prepared for it and BBIL will file those documents in 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, it said.