Company: IMCR
Filing Date: 2025-02-26
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001671927-25-000006
Chunk: 139

Company: Immunocore Holdings plc
Filing Date: 2025-02-26
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1A
Chunk 139
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C-T119C, IMC-R117C, IMC-S118AI, and IMC-U120AI, we do not own or in-license any issued patents relating to such other product candidates, and we can provide no assurance that any of our current or future patent applications will result in issued patents or that any issued patents will provide us with any competitive advantage. In addition, the laws of foreign jurisdictions may not protect our rights to the same extent as the laws of the United States. Furthermore, patents have a limited lifespan. In the United States and countries of the EU, the natural expiration of a patent is generally twenty years after it is filed. Various extensions may be available; however, the life of a patent, and the protection it affords, is limited. Given the amount of time required for the development, testing and regulatory review of new product candidates, patents protecting such candidates might expire before or shortly after such candidates are commercialized. As a result, our patent portfolio may not provide us with adequate and continuing patent protection sufficient to exclude others from commercializing products similar or identical to our product candidates, including generic versions of such products.

Furthermore, certain of our patents and technology were funded in part by investments from non-profit third parties, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (the "Gates Foundation"). We are required to fulfill certain contractual obligations with respect to products created using such grant funding, including making certain products available at an affordable price in a list of clearly defined low and lower-middle income countries. For more information, see “Item 1. Business—Our Collaborations and License Agreements—Gates Collaboration.”

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Other parties may have developed technologies that are related or competitive to our own, and such parties may have filed or may file patent applications, or may have received or may receive issued patents, claiming inventions that may overlap or conflict with those claimed in our own patent applications or issued patents, with respect to either the same methods or formulations or the same subject matter. Publications of discoveries in the scientific literature often lag behind the actual discoveries, and patent applications in the United States and other jurisdictions are typically not published until 18 months after filing, or in some cases not at all. Therefore, we cannot know with certainty whether we or our licensors or collaborators were the first to make the inventions claimed in our pending patent applications or any patent application we may license now or in the future, or that we or our licensors or collaborators were the first to file for patent protection of such inventions. In