CRISPR patent goes to MIT, Harvard group over UC Berkeley

An ongoing inter-university battle that has absolutely nothing to do with football, basketball, rowing, or any sport, for that matter, may have just concluded.

On Monday, a tribunal within the US Patent and Trademark Office ruled that CRISPR—the precise, cost-effective, game-changing gene-editing technique—is the intellectual property of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. The University of California Berkeley and University of Vienna are the other institutions in the mix here, and they plan to challenge the decision.

Why it matters: Several biotech companies have licensed CRISPR tech from Berkeley, rather than the Broad Institute, STAT reports, and now they may need to obtain new licensing deals and patents.

• “This is pretty bad news for anyone who has a license for Berkeley’s technology,” Jacob Sherkow, a patent attorney and professor at the University of Illinois College of Law, told Stat. “They have over 100 patent claims that just got wiped off the face of the earth.”

Intellia Therapeutics, which became the first company to successfully use CRISPR to treat disease in vivo—i.e., inside the human body—last June, is among the companies with a Berkeley license. Even so, the company told Bloomberg the decision does not impact its development plans, and another leading CRISPR startup that’s in the same position, CRISPR Therapeutics, basically said the same.

History lesson

CRISPR was first described by Jennifer Doudna, of UC Berkeley, and Emmanuelle Charpentier, of the Max Planck Institute, in a 2012 paper. They won the Nobel Pize in chemistry for this work in 2020.

But, but, but…Their initial article focused on the use of CRISPR to edit genes in a test tube—not eukaryotic cells, i.e., in an animal or human. A few months later, in January 2013, Broad Institute scientists published a paper documenting the technique worked for animal and human cells, and that is the basis upon which the Patent Office’s appeals board determined the Broad Institute has ownership.

• Both groups initially filed for patents in 2012, and the legal fight has more or less been raging on since.

Bottom line: Intellectual property battles, like the fight over CRISPR, could be a major hindrance to the bioeconomy’s growth.