UC Berkeley Loses CRISPR Patent Case

🧬 The US Patent and Trademark Office ruled this week that the Harvard-MIT Broad Institute – not UC Berkeley – was the first to invent CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology for use in animals, including humans.

• This decision invalidates claims made by a pair of researchers who won the 2020 Nobel Prize for developing the tech – Jennifer Doudna from UC Berkeley and Emmanuelle Charpentier from the University of Vienna.
• Several biotech companies, including Intellia, Caribou Biosciences and CRISPR Therapeutics, currently license CRISPR technology from a company formed by the Nobel researchers’ universities.
• Monday's ruling invalidates those patents, meaning the biotech companies must now license the gene-editing tech from the Broad Institute.
• Editas Medicine Inc., which holds an exclusive CRISPR licensing agreement with the Broad Institute, saw its shares rise 17% overnight Monday.

✋ Yes, but: Biotech companies are already pursuing other gene-editing technologies that wouldn’t be covered under existing patents – like using an enzyme other than Cas9 to edit the genome, or trying a different technique called base editing.

• “’[The court’s ruling] will be really, really important for a short period of time then not so much anymore,” ​​Jacob Sherkow, a professor of law at the University of Illinois, told Bloomberg.

👀 Looking ahead... The UC Berkeley group said it’s “considering various options to challenge this decision,” which can be appealed one step further to the federal circuit court.

+Dig deeper: Read the details of the case.