Nordic files patent suit against Oxford Biomed

Bavarian Nordic, a Denmark-based biopharmaceutical firm, has filed a patent infringement suit against UK-based gene therapy company Oxford BioMedica in the US District Court of Southern California.

The Danish firm claims that the defendant has infringed on its US patents by commercializing the technology in ways that have yielded large payments from French giant Sanofi-Aventis under an agreement with the UK company for the development and commercialization of the renal cancer vaccine TroVax.

Nordic asserts three US patents as a basis for its action, 6,761,893, 6,913,752 and 7,335,364. These relate to an attenuated strain of the company's core technology, MVA-BN, which is the basis for its smallpox vaccine, Imvamune. MVA-BN may also hold promise as a vector for delivering recombinant vaccines, according to the Danish company.