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The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decided today (September 10) that the Broad Institute, MIT, and Harvard deserved critical patents on the genome editing technology CRISPR that the University of California, Berkeley, had challenged.
Specifically, the court affirms the decision by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) in February 2017 that the Broad’s patents don’t step on CRISPR applications that researchers from Berkeley and the University of Vienna had filed patents for at an earlier date. That means that the Broad will continue to hold the intellectual property for the use of the CRISPR gene editing in eukaryotes—the most lucrative application of the technology.
“The PTAB decision, even if you don’t agree with its contents, it was still thorough and well-reasoned, and so there’s nothing for the federal circuit to do except affirm it,” says New York Law School’s Jake Sherkow, who ...
