Patent Office Rules CRISPR Patents, Potentially Worth Billions, Belong To Broad Institute (theverge.com)

According to a ruling by judges at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the disputed patents on the gene-editing tool CRISPR belong to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. "The ruling comes a little over two months after a high-profile court hearing, during which MIT and University of California, Berkeley heatedly argued about who should own CRISPR," The Verge reports. From their report: STAT News reported that the decision was one sentence long. The three judges decided that the Broad patents are different enough from the ones the University of California applied for that the Broad patents stand. The patent ruling suggests that the work done by Jennifer Doudna of the University of California and her colleagues on CRISPR wasn't so groundbreaking as to make any other advance obvious. But that legal opinion isn't how the science world views her work, STAT points out: "Doudna and her chief collaborator, Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in the life sciences in 2015, the $500,000 Gruber Genetics Prize in 2015, and the $450,000 Japan Prize in 2017," the outlet notes.

Comments

Two different things

[Geoffrey.landis]

"The patent ruling suggests that the work done by Jennifer Doudna of the University of California and her colleagues on CRISPR wasn't so groundbreaking as to make any other advance obvious. But that legal opinion isn't how the science world views her work, STAT points out: "Doudna and her chief collaborator, Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in the life sciences in 2015, the $500,000 Gruber Genetics Prize in 2015, and the $450,000 Ja..."

These are two different things. The patent ruling was only about whether the work by Doudna, Charpentier et al. made the MIT/Harvard work "obvious". The Breakthrough and other prizes didn't care whether the MIT/Harvard work was obvious or not, it was an award for heir work being a breakthrough, whether it led to any applications or not.

Re:Two different things

[coldandcalculating]

Important points from the article:

"It all began in 2012, when UC Berkeley biochemist Jennifer Doudna and others, including Charpentier, published a seminal Science paper on CRISPR. In this paper, Doudna showed that the gene-editing technology can be used to cut DNA in a test tube at targeted sites. Later, Doudna filed a patent application for CRISPR."

"Then in 2013, in another Science paper, MIT bioengineer Feng Zhang and his team reported developing a CRISPR system that edited genomes in eukaryotic cells — the cells of animals and people. When Zhang filed his own patent application, he applied for the PTO to “fast track” its patent review process. The result was that although UC Berkeley filed first, the PTO actually awarded the patent to the Broad and MIT in April 2014. (The Broad and MIT were later awarded a bunch of other CRISPR patents.) So UC Berkeley asked for a so-called “interference proceeding” — an official reassessment to determine who was the first to invent the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9.

This is why many in the life science community feel that Doudna/Charpentier got short-changed. This all happened right before the switch to the current "first-to-file" rule in USPTO. Also, many in the life sciences are frustrated at claims that Zhang's application to eukaryotic cells wasn't obvious. Those aforementioned awards were given to D/C precisely because scientists recognized the (obvious) potential of CRISPR/Cas to revolutionize the treatment of human disease. While Zhang's group has done some groundbreaking later work in the CRISPR field, Doudna et al probably deserve the patent. But props to MIT/Zhang for having a better understanding of patent law. That counts for a lot these days.

Re:Is there a product these patents protect?

[interkin3tic]

There are about a dozen companies using licenses from one or the other to develop products. Including Editas which was oddly founded by Doudna of UC Berkley AND Zhang of the Broad institute

Not sure there's any CRISPR products for sale yet because research doesn't move as fast as the legal system does, but it's definitely not patent trolling. Almost every molecular biology lab is starting to use crispr in some capacity, So there should be applications coming out eventually.

There are supposedly some edited dogs in china I guess?