Hyderabad: Bharat Biotech was working on developing a COVID-19 vaccine Ensuring product availability as soon as possible is the top priority. BBIL’s COVID vaccine development faced many challenges and all organisations were in a hurry to develop the vaccine and file appropriate patents before any other entity did or before any data was published in journals.

Bharat Biotech’s COVID vaccine application was filed under the above circumstances and since BBIL-ICMR A copy of the agreement was not available as it is a confidential document. Hence, ICMR was not included in the original application. Though this was completely unintentional, such mistakes are not uncommon. Patents Therefore the patent law provides provisions to rectify such mistakes.

BBIL has great respect for ICMR and is grateful to ICMR for their continued support on various projects, hence as soon as this inadvertent mistake was discovered, BBIL has initiated the process to rectify it by including ICMR as co-owner of the patent applications for the COVID-19 vaccine. The necessary legal documents for this are being prepared and as soon as they are ready and signed, BBIL will file those documents with the Patent Office. These actions are as per the MoU (Memorandum of understandingMoU was signed between ICMR-NIV Pune and BBIL in April 2020 for joint development of COVID-19 vaccine.