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Last month, the US Patent and Trademark Office reignited the infamous CRISPR patent dispute when it declared interference—overlapping intellectual property—between several pending patents belonging to the University of California and patents already awarded to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University.
The legal battle between the Broad and the University of California (UC) over CRISPR-related intellectual property (IP) has been raging for years. The patents cover the use of the CRISPR-Cas9 system for gene editing in eukaryotic cells—for which the Broad was awarded a foundational patent by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in 2014. At the time, UC called for an interference hearing, claiming that Broad’s patent overlapped with one that UC Berkeley, the University of Vienna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier (formerly at the University of Vienna) had filed for two years earlier.
The USPTO had initially ruled in favor of the Broad, stating ...
