© BRYAN SATALINOUpdate (April 13): The University of California, Berkeley, has filed an appeal with the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, DC, challenging the February ruling of the US Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), which determined that the patent issued in 2014 for Feng Zhang and colleagues’ work on CRISPR gene-editing technology at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard does not directly compete with a patent filed previously by the UC Berkeley team. In other words, the PTAB ruled that the two parties’ claims were separately patentable.
“Ultimately, we expect to establish definitively that the team led by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier was the first to engineer CRISPR-Cas9 for use in all types of environments, including in non-cellular settings and within plant, animal and even human cells,” molecular and cell biologist Edward Penhoet, associate dean of biology at UC Berkeley and a special adviser on CRISPR to the UC president and UC Berkeley chancellor, said in a statement.
But in a statement from the Broad, Chief Communications Officer Lee McGuire expressed confidence in the institute’s existing CRISPR patent. “Given that the facts have not changed, we expect the outcome will once again be the same,” he said. “To overturn the PTAB decision, the Court would need to decide that the PTAB ...
