That would be, ironically, moderna. Will the patent court award them negative damages?
On a more serious note, to stave off conspiratorial thinking, it should be "not crazy" that a moderna furin sequence appear. If I told a biochemist to go and insert a furin cleavage site into a virus, that grad student would do an NCBI blast search and get a list of all sequences. Maybe they are more knowledgeable than me and did know that patent search was enabled (or maybe they were used to ripping off parents :| -- I'm anti-patent myself so this is not an indictment of the general process). Then that library of say a few hundred sequences is applied. Then the grad student, say, drops the 96-well plate with the virus samples, and gets infected -- It should not be surprising that the moderna sequence is the winner in the competition amongst the viruses in that grad students body because moderna has engineered that site to be a very effective site, and we know that having the furin cleavage site is correlated to virulence, so "natural selection" kicks in.
> On a more serious note, to stave off conspiratorial thinking, it should be "not crazy" that a moderna furin sequence appear. If I told a biochemist to go and insert a furin cleavage site into a virus, that grad student would do an NCBI blast search and get a list of all sequences.
The weird part is, prior to 2020, a BLAST search only results in Moderna patents. There wasn't anything there for them to copy from.
