WIKIMEDIA, NATIONAL HUMAN GENOME RESEARCH INSTITUTEOn Tuesday (December 6), lawyers representing the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley, pled their respective clients’ cases to at the US Patent and Trademark Office, in the matter of who should own the intellectual property rights for the powerful—and increasingly lucrative—CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology.
The Scientist covered the oral arguments and the possible outcomes of the case, but there was much we left out of our initial article. Here’s the rest of the story:
At the heart of this case is the question of whether or not the early prokaryotic and in vitro work on the CRISPR system—described by UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna and colleagues in a 2012 patent application and published online in Science that June—could be used by a “person of ordinary skill in the art” of genome engineering to apply the pathway to eukaryotic cells with a “reasonable expectation of success.” If so, the later work of Feng Zhang at the Broad, patented in 2014 and published in Science in 2013, would not entitle the Broad ...
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