Earlier today, a legal issue surrounding patents of CRISPR research has finally come to a close. The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled to uphold Harvard University and Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institure of Technology’s patent filed for CRISPR genomic editing in species with complex cells. The conflict arose when the inventors of CRISPR technology challenged the legitimacy of the Broad patent, claiming that it infringed on their own original patent.
University of California, Berkeley researchers Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier created the genomic editing tool CRISPR in 2012, filing their patent for genomic editing of small organisms such as bacteria. Their patent just received approval in the US this June, growing their areas of patent approval from the UK, Japan, China, Australia, Mexico, New Zealand, and other countries.
In 2014, during this 5-year waiting period in which the Berkeley patent was pending approval, Broad Institute filed their patent for CRISPR research. Led by Feng Zhang and his research group, this rushed patent was filed for use of CRISPR gene editing on complex cells, such as those of animals and plants. The Broad patent received approval in 2017, however the Berkeley team did not see this to be acceptable.
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Feeling as though the Broad patent infringed on their own CRISPR patent, the Berkeley researchers appealed the patent, however the Patent Trial and Appeal Board deemed the Broad patent to be an independent and unique patent. The court’s decision issued today designates that the previous decision made in April of 2017 is to be upheld, and that Broad’s CRISPR patent is valid. Being that Berkeley’s research with CRISPR is done in lab settings with single-celled organisms and Broad’s research will pertain more to larger, living organisms, the two bodies of CRISPR research were ruled distinctly separate by the court.
The battle in court appears to be suppressed, for now. Whether or not Berkeley plans to appeal the case again to the Supreme Court is not known, nor is the likelihood that the court would pick up the case if they did.
CRISPR research is short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, and usually refers to processes utilizing CRISPR alongside the Cas9 protein to ‘snip’ pieces of genetic material to edit a genome. The technology has a wide range of potential applications in biology, with companies such as DowDupont Chemical, Charpentier’s CRISPR Therapeutics and Editas Medicine expressing interest in integrating CRISPR technologies into genetically modifying crops and synthesizing drugs. The latter two have teamed up with Berkeley and Broad, respectively. Editas even paid over $10 million of Broads legal fees already.
Pivotal CRISPR patent battle won by Broad Institute https://t.co/gDYBM9ceRo pic.twitter.com/7N6tJYRscs
— Nature News & Comment (@NatureNews) September 10, 2018
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