Harvard and MIT Scientists Just Won a Big Patent Fight for the CRISPR Gene Editing Technology

Three judges on the Patent Trial and Appeal Board have ruled that lucrative patents on the gene editing technology known as CRISPR belong to the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. CRISPR was first developed by Jennifer Doudna from the University of California, Berkeley, and Emmanuelle Charpentier, then at the University of Vienna and now at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. The University of California filed a patent in May 2012 for ownership of the technology as it applies to all of its uses, in all types of cells. The office had not ruled on that application yet when the Broad Institute filed a similar request in April 2014. Broad’s application concerned so-called eukaryotic cells, which include plant and animal (as well as human) cells. Broad paid for expedited review and received its patent. UC Berkeley filed suit against the Broad in 2016 claiming that the Broad patents “interfered” with their original request. The judges ruled Wednesday that the Broad technique was sufficiently different from Berkeley’s technology, and therefore could be patented — independently and separately. Doudna and Charpentier demonstrated that CRISPR could cut raw DNA precisely in a test tube. Broad’s team, led by Feng Zhang, showed that CRISPR could work inside living cells, including human ones. Berkeley argued that Zhang’s work was an extension of Doudna’s and Charpentier’s. But the patent office disagreed.