Immunocore Holdings Plc

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 addition, although we enter into non-disclosure and confidentiality agreements with parties who have access to confidential or patentable aspects of our research and development output, such as our employees, corporate collaborators, outside scientific collaborators, CROs, contract manufacturers, consultants, advisors, and other third parties, any of these parties may breach the agreements and disclose such output before a patent application is filed, thereby jeopardizing our ability to seek patent protection. As a result, the issuance, scope, validity, enforceability and commercial value of our patent rights cannot be predicted with any certainty.

In addition, the patent prosecution process is expensive and time-consuming, and we may not be able to file and prosecute all necessary or desirable patent applications at a reasonable cost or in a timely manner. Further, with respect to most of the pending patent applications covering our product candidates, prosecution has yet to commence. Patent prosecution is a lengthy process, during which the scope of the claims initially submitted for examination by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ("USPTO"), or its global equivalents, are often significantly narrowed by the time they issue, if they issue at all. Accordingly, it is possible that our present or future pending patent applications (whether owned or licensed) will not lead to issued patents. It is also possible that we will fail to identify patentable aspects of our research and development output before it is too late to obtain patent protection or that we may not develop additional proprietary technologies that are patentable.

Moreover, in some circumstances, we may not have the right to control the preparation, filing and prosecution of patent applications, or to maintain the patents, covering technology that we may license from third parties. Therefore, these patents and applications may not be prosecuted and enforced in a manner consistent with the best interests of our business.

Even if we acquire patent protection that we expect should enable us to maintain a competitive advantage, third parties may challenge the validity, enforceability or scope thereof, which may result in such patents being narrowed, invalidated or held unenforceable. The issuance of a patent is not conclusive as to its inventorship, scope, validity or enforceability, and our patents or any patent we may license may be challenged in the courts or patent offices in the United States and abroad. For example, we may be subject to a third-party submission of prior art to the USPTO challenging the priority of an invention claimed within one of our patents, which submissions may also be made prior to a patent’s issuance, precluding the granting of any of our pending patent applications. We may become involved in opposition, derivation, re-examination, revocation, inter partes review, post-grant review, interference or other proceedings challenging our patent rights or the patent rights of others from whom we have obtained licenses to such rights.