Moderna has announced it is suing Pfizer and BIontech, alleging the Pfizer vaccine infringed on three patents owned by Moderna related to mRNA vaccine technology.

The company has filed two lawsuits, one in US federal court, and one in Germany, where Biontech is based. Moderna is seeking monetary damages in all countries where it enforces its patents, excluding 92 lower income countries where it does not actively pursue violations of intellectual property. It is only seeking damages for infringements which occurred after March 7th.

Pfizer and Biotech said in a statement, “Pfizer/BioNTech has not yet fully reviewed the complaint but we are surprised by the litigation given the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine was based on BioNTech’s proprietary mRNA technology and developed by both BioNTech and Pfizer.”

Moderna maintains Pfizer and Biontech copied Moderna’s vaccine design, including a means of delivering the vaccine into arms so as to avoid an immune response which would have attacked the mRNA before it could enter cells and begin production of the spike protein.

Moderna said in its lawsuit, “Moderna refrained from asserting its patents earlier so as not to distract from efforts to bring the pandemic to an end as quickly as possible.”

Moderna maintained that Pfizer and Biontech intially focused on other drug candidates, “However, as Pfizer and BioNTech got further along in their clinical development, they ultimately focused exclusively on vaccine designs that used Moderna’s patented technologies,” according to the lawsuit.

Moderna noted in its lawsuit it had been developing mRNA vaccine technology going back to 2011, and one top FDA vaccine official had called one of their advancements, “the most important thing that people have done with mRNA vaccines.”

Moderna also claimed in its suit, “Pfizer and BioNTech chose to advance BNT162b2 as their lead vaccine candidate knowing that it utilized the same target antigen as Moderna’s patent-protected Spikevax. Defendants continued to use the invention claimed in the…patent in deliberate disregard for Moderna’s patent rights.”

In a statement, Moderna’s chief legal officer, Shannon Thyme Kilinger, said Moderna “expects Pfizer and BioNTech to compensate Moderna for Comirnaty’s ongoing use of Moderna’s patented technologies.”

In response, Pfizer/BioNTech said, “We remain confident in our intellectual property supporting the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and will vigorously defend against the allegations of the lawsuit.”

SVB Securities Research’s Mani Foroohar, said in a note Friday about the suit, “While the timing of any legal response is unclear, we expect PFE/BNTX to weaponize their own patent portfolio in response. Ultimately, while each case is unique, the history of IP disputes among oligo companies suggests the most likely outcome would be modest royalties paid by both companies, with little net favorable financial impact for anyone but the law firms involved.”

A separate biotechnology company, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (ALNY), has produced some evidence it had developed a lipid nanoparticle delivery system used in the vaccines as early as 2010. It is suing both Moderna and Pfizer separately, over what it claims was an infringement upon its intellectual property.