On Aug. 6, 2024, the University of Pennsylvania announced it had sued German biotechnology firm BioNTech n Pennsylvania federal court, accusing the company of underpaying royalties for patents covering Penn technology used in BioNTech and Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine Comirnaty.

The lawsuit said that BioNTech owed the school a greater share of its worldwide vaccine sales for using “foundational” messenger RNA (mRNA) inventions developed by Penn professors and Nobel Prize winners Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman. Pfizer was not included as a defendant.