The LES Deal of Distinction award recognizes major business transactions involving licensing, that exemplify best practices and creativity to achieve strategic product development objectives, with a significant impact on advancing innovation in the industry sectors that comprise LES which includes pharmaceutical and biomedical technology. This LES award specifically recognizes two deals that were negotiated by NIAID technology transfer officers with an array of partners in industry and academic institutions, or Industry University Government Interface (IUGI) sector. The result of this work was the development of one of the now widely recognized mRNA vaccines that provides a high level of protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection or the development of severe COVID-19.

In 2016, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the Scripps Research Institute, and Dartmouth College discovered that the spike proteins of a group of known coronaviruses can be engineered to maintain a shape that has many favorable properties for vaccine development. Once the SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence was released in January 2020, many members of the same collaborative team which now included employees of the University of Texas at Austin, worked to generate an engineered version of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and publish the results in less than 2 months. Shortly after the engineered SARS-CoV-2 spike protein was published, NIAID received a significant amount of interest from companies that wanted to obtain the right to incorporate the engineered SARS-CoV-2 spike into their vaccine platform technology, primarily to develop a commercial vaccine. At that point, it was not clear which potential vaccine candidate would be effective. Some of the potential licensees also planned to use novel but unproven platform technologies that had not been approved by the FDA or other regulatory agencies, such as mRNA. A multi-pronged development approach made the most sense, given the scope of the public health emergency posed by COVID-19. These circumstances made it clear that a non-exclusive license should be used to facilitate the development of many candidates, in case only one or few proved to be effective. Speed of development was also critical. This meant that an NIAID-Lead Inter-Institutional Agreement (IIA) to consolidate management of the patent rights with one party for patenting and licensing was also essential for rapid development. The federal licensing statutes and regulations require a formal review and approval process before an exclusive license can be granted to any government owned intellectual property rights, so additional time was saved with a non-exclusive licensing strategy.

The 2020 license with BioNTech and subsequent partnership with Pfizer produced an mRNAbased vaccine that received a license to enter interstate commerce by the FDA and has been administered hundreds of millions of times across the world.