London, May 9, 2026, 18:05 BST
A U.S. federal judge has thrown out Acuitas Therapeutics Inc.’s bid to clear Pfizer and BioNTech’s Comirnaty Covid-19 vaccine of GSK patent allegations, giving the British drugmaker a procedural win in a still-running messenger RNA dispute. Judge Gregory B. Williams granted GSK units’ motion to dismiss the case for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction, meaning the court found it lacked power to hear Acuitas’ claim in that form, Bloomberg Law reported Friday.
The ruling matters because it keeps pressure on the main Delaware fight between GSK, Pfizer and BioNTech, rather than letting a supplier-led challenge cut across it. GSK sued the two vaccine makers in 2024, alleging Comirnaty infringed patents tied to mRNA-vaccine technology developed more than a decade before the pandemic; Pfizer said then it would defend its position and BioNTech declined to comment.
Messenger RNA, or mRNA, uses genetic instructions to prompt an immune response. The pandemic sales boom has faded, but the patents still matter because they can affect royalties on Covid, flu and combination vaccines as drugmakers push the technology into new uses.
Acuitas filed its declaratory judgment case — a suit asking a court to settle legal rights before a liability finding — in Delaware on Jan. 2, 2025 against GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals SA and GlaxoSmithKline LLC. Its complaint sought rulings of non-infringement and invalidity over five GSK patents, a docket summary showed.
Those same patents sit in GSK’s broader case against Pfizer, Pharmacia & Upjohn and BioNTech units over several Comirnaty versions, according to a vaccine litigation tracker. The tracker also lists separate pending GSK cases against Moderna over its Spikevax Covid vaccine and mRESVIA RSV shot, showing how mRNA patent fights have spread across the vaccine sector.
Still, this is not a ruling on the heart of the dispute. It does not decide whether Comirnaty infringes GSK’s patents, or whether the patents will survive challenges. Pfizer and BioNTech can keep fighting the core case.
GSK has already drawn cash from a neighboring mRNA patent fight. In August 2025, CureVac and GSK settled litigation with Pfizer and BioNTech, with Reuters reporting that CureVac and GSK would receive $740 million upfront and royalties, while GSK’s own separate litigation against Pfizer and BioNTech was unaffected.
GSK said at the time its share was $370 million upfront, plus a 1% royalty on U.S. sales by BioNTech and Pfizer of influenza, Covid-19 and related combination mRNA vaccine products from the start of 2025. It also said it could receive another $130 million and royalties outside the United States if BioNTech’s CureVac acquisition closed.
For Chief Executive Luke Miels, the patent cases are useful, but they are not the main investor test. Reuters reported last month that Miels is under pressure to show GSK’s research engine can support a target of more than 40 billion pounds in sales by 2031, while the company faces the 2028 patent expiry of dolutegravir, a key HIV medicine.
GSK’s first-quarter update showed sales of 7.6 billion pounds and core earnings per share of 46.5 pence. The company kept its 2026 turnover growth forecast at 3% to 5%, said it had executed 1.7 billion pounds of a 2 billion pound buyback, and declared a 17 pence first-quarter dividend.
But the legal win could stay narrow. A dismissal on jurisdiction does not create royalty revenue by itself, and the underlying patent claims may still be narrowed, invalidated or avoided. The sealed reasoning also leaves investors with limited detail on how far the decision helps GSK.
GSK’s U.S.-listed shares last traded Friday at $50.41, little changed on the day, with regular London trading closed for the weekend. The muted move suggests the ruling was not enough, on its own, to shift the wider debate over GSK’s pipeline, patent cliff and sales target.
