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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.
So the deep pockets win again.
Also... WTF? We stand on the shoulders of giants every day while we share and consume information, yet only one entity gets to own the technique derived from all these other people's efforts. And it's no surprise to me that it is an entity which absolutely doesn't need it.
Seriously, screw these schools who make you pay them to own your ideas... what better business is there?
It's the same thing with college sports... billions of $$ and all straight into the war chests of these institutions and the player gets to pay for the privilege...
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
"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.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
"Re:Is there a product these patents protect?"
Yes.
In (overly broad) summary, Jennifer Doudna and collaborators showed that CRISPR could cut DNA at targeted sites. Zhang and collaborators used that targeting capability to edit DNA. Editing DNA is the product you asked about (in patent terminology, a method of doing something is patentable). That product use uses the cutting that Dudna demonstrated.
A quick (and still overly broad) analysis is that Dudna et al discovered the science, and Zhang et al reduced it to practice. However, reducing it to practice only gets you a patent if it's not obvious.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Both institutions may have received federal monies to support the research leading to CRISPR.
If they did, then the 'ownership' should be public - as in: they receive nothing more than intellectual kudos,
No Patents, no copyrights, no kickbacks.
Enough of the institutional power plays.
What about the scientists that did it? What do they get, besides a paycheck.....
Just so much is not right in this...
"The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (/brod/), often referred to as the Broad Institute, is a biomedical and genomic research center located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. The institute is independently governed and supported as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit research organization under the name Broad Institute Inc.,[1][2] and is partners with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and the five Harvard teaching hospitals." Rather interesting place. You've got Harvard, MIT and the Partners Healthcare hospitals - it's a pretty potent research institute.
Why should CRISPR be eligible for patent protection at all?
If by "discovered the science", you meant "developed the protocol for doing genome engineering (in prokaryotes) that could then be immediately applied to eukaryotes by Zhang after he watched Doudna's presentation on the topic", then sure.
It's a process, which can lead to products. An easier to understand example is Revere Ware pots and pans. Earlier versions of them are stamped "process patent" because the pots and pans themselves were not what was patented. Instead, they patented the *process* of bonding the copper to the bottom of the pan, which is less obvious than you might think.
If you want to argue against patents of any kind, OK; but the notion of patenting a process which leads to products is pretty well established under the umbrella of patents.
The U.S. Patent system has become a travesty. Rulings like this make me sick to my stomach. "Fast track" should never have passed legal muster.
Moreover, it bothers me that the government can take someone's physical property to build a road or even a mall, but they don't apply eminent domain to life saving intellectual property.
:T:R:A:N:S:
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?
"Thus, CRISPR could be best compared to replacing a hacksaw with a laser cutter. The general public has no need of such a tool"
On the contrary, like a laser cutter the general public does have much use for the tool. Unlike laser cutters the fundamental tools are being locked behind non-disclosure agreements and patents artificially inflating the price to play dramatically. If the general public had no use for such tools makers clubs, diy bio groups, etc wouldn't exist at all. As it stands diy bio groups are limited to mostly cookie cutter protocols that repeat previous experiments because the more general purpose tools (both those which exist and those which they could produce) are locked behind paywalls.
There is no great magic behind synthesizing RNA and PCR for instance and certainly no reason for these materials to be expensive but getting your hands on the materials for a laymen is rather difficult and even if you can it normally comes with an agreement which precludes using those tools to replicate those precursors and share along with information on how to do the same. Information on using common bacterial, viral, etc vectors and basic tools to work with them should be completely free as well.
We desperately need a bioGNU. Many of these processes are actually refined nearly to the point of being programmable like code but access is kept strictly controlled and/or key pieces that allow one to cheaply and easily replicate the precursors is held back to artificially limit access and drive up prices.