 |
|
|
|||||
Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech on Friday lost their bid to overturn a ruling that their COVID-19 vaccine infringed one of Moderna’s patents at London’s Court of Appeal. Last year, the High Court ruled that one of Moderna’s patents relating to the messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, which underpinned its COVID-19 vaccine, was valid and that Pfizer and BioNTech’s Comirnaty vaccine had infringed it, meaning Moderna is entitled to damages in relation to sales after March 2022. The High Court also ruled that the other Moderna patent under challenge in the case was invalid. Moderna was refused permission to appeal against that decision. But Pfizer and BioNTech were granted permission to appeal in an attempt to try and invalidate Moderna’s second patent and appealed earlier this month, arguing Moderna’s developments of mRNA technology were obvious developments of previous work, rendering the patent invalid. Judge Richard Arnold, however, rejected Pfizer and BioNTech’s appeal. Pfizer and BioNTech said in a joint statement that the decision “does not change our unwavering stance that this patent is invalid” and the companies will seek to appeal. “This decision has no immediate impact on Pfizer and BioNTech or Comirnaty,” the companies added. Moderna did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Friday’s decision in the latest ruling in the legal dispute between the two sides over their competing vaccines, which helped save millions of lives during the pandemic. The companies have also been involved in proceedings in Germanywhere a court ruled in Moderna’s favour in Marchthe United States Patent Office, which held that two Moderna COVID-19 vaccine patents were invalid, and elsewhere. Sam Tobin, Reuters
Category:
E-Commerce
McDonald’s plans to “double down” on its artificial intelligence investments by 2027 and is betting on India to be a key hub for data governance, engineering and platform architecture, a senior executive said on Friday. The fast-food giant, which entered India in 1996, operates hundreds of restaurants across the country and recently set up a global office in the southern city of Hyderabad, with an aim to make it the largest outside the United States. “We’re still in the early stages, so it’s hard to pin down the exact investment,” McDonald’s head of Global Business Services operations, Deshant Kaila, said in an interview on the sidelines of an event in Hyderabad. McDonald’s is using AI to verify orders at 400 restaurants to pre-empt errors before handing them over to customers, and expects to roll this out to 40,000 locations globally by 2027, Durga Prakash, head of technology (global offices), said. The fast-food giant is also using AI tools to forecast sales, decide on pricing and assess product performance and is building a personalised app, which would work across countries, according to Kaila. He said the India push will centre on building its AI team, but added that spending will lean more toward technology and tools, not headcount. The company is in talks to set up a global office in Poland, just like the ones in India and Mexico, according to Durga Prakash. Earlier this year, the southern Indian state of Telangana said that McDonald’s would launch a global capability center, employing 2,000 people in Hyderabad. India’s global capability centers, once low-cost outsourcing hubs for global corporations, have evolved to support their parent organisations in domains ranging from operations and finance to research and development. Rishika Sadam, Reuters
Category:
E-Commerce
Midsize cities are where the growth is. Thats according to new report from BILL, the payments management company used by nearly half a million small and medium-size businesses and that processes around 1% of U.S. GDP. The report analyzed business-to-business accounts payable spending of companies with between 2 and 200 employees from the largest 342 U.S. cities with a population of 100,000 or more. Heres what to know: While payments per company from large cities grew 11% year-over-year during the 12-month period ending May 2025, midsize cities have grown 32% over the same period. Since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, the growth in payments per company from midsize cities is two times that of large cities. While growth in midsize cities has increased by 200%, large cities growth escalated by just 113%. Since January 2025, one month before the introduction of new tariffs, midsize cities have outpaced payments growth from large cities by nearly three times, with payments in large cities growing by 1.9% and midsize cities growing 5.5% in payment volume per business. Below are the five U.S. cities with the fastest growing payments this year. All five are midsize cites. 1. Mesquite, Texas 2. El Monte, California 3. South Fulton, Georgia 4. Quincy, Massachusetts 5. Broken Arrow, Oklahoma BILL Chief Economist Fergus McCormick says hes never seen this trend before. Through the data from May, were seeing really strong growth and resilience among SMBs in midsize cities, he says. Thats the key message. The South and West regions of the U.S. have seen the fastest payments growth by city. This trend in data follows the exodus of people from larger cities during Covid-19, when an estimated 2 million migrated to the South and 957,000 to the West. According to the report, midsize cities in California and Texas saw the highest payments growth since May 2024. Those two states are also home to nine of the 25 fastest-growing cities this year, all midsize. Other factors drawing people to midsize cities include a lower cost of living, stronger schools, safer neighborhoods and the increased regularity of working remotely. McCormick says we are truly in the era of the midsize city. This payments data is a leading indicator of economic activity across the United States, he says. To the extent that we can help people understand the trends in economic activity, that is absolute gold. By Ava Levinson This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister publication, Inc. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||