CRISPR patent battle falls on Broad Zhang team

Last week, the Patent Examination and Appeal Board of the United States Patent and Trademark Office received heavy news-the department announced that the Broad Institute affiliated to Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology continued to retain the CRISPR-Cas9 application patent approved in 2014. The patent dispute for this revolutionary gene editing tool has largely settled.

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Ruling on CRISPR Patent Dispute

The controversial point of this patent dispute is novelty. Referring to 35 U.S.C. 102, the inventor may obtain a patent unless-before the effective filing date of the invention for which the patent claim is filed-the invention has been patented, described in a printed publication, publicly used, sold or otherwise made available to the public.

In fact, Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, and others first published a paper on CRISPR technology online in the American journal Science in June 2012, and first submitted a patent application one month before that. The Zhang Feng team of the Broad Institute only filed a patent application in December. So Berkeley is superior to the Broad Institute in terms of time.

However, the method described in the article by Klee is in a non-cellular in vitro environment and does not involve eukaryotic cell gene editing. The patent application of Broad Institute proves for the first time that CRISPR technology can be applied to eukaryotic cells, and clarifies how to use this gene editing system to edit the DNA of eukaryotic organisms, such as plants, livestock and even humans. As a result, three judges of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's Patent Trial and Appeal Board ruled that the CRISPR technology patent obtained by the Broad Institute in 2014 was a different patent from the patent application filed by Berkeley, and that the former was not affected by the latter's patent application. So the RISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology submitted by the Brosd Institute is novel and patented.

Some patent scholars said that the details of the USPTO ruling will weaken the Berkeley researchers' idea of promoting this technology in eukaryotic cells. Many of the USPTO's 50-page ruling reports have proved the application of CRISPR-Cas9 in eukaryotic cells (described in the Broad Institute patents). In addition to the description in Berkeley's patent applications, additional innovations are needed.

But Berkeley said in a statement on the 15th that they will likely continue to appeal. And their intellectual property rights have been granted to a number of companies that want to carry out CRISPR-Cas9 technology research in eukaryotic cells, and these companies are also unwilling to pay Broad's corresponding patent use fees.

At present, the two sides have also submitted similar patents in Europe, and are still competing for the corresponding patent rights. Patent lawyer Catherine Coombes said that the final decision in Europe may not have to follow the USPTO's corresponding ruling path. Based on the corresponding European law, the EPO will selectively assess whether the extensive gene-editing system described in the Berkeley patent would provide enough impetus to make a qualitative leap forward in eukaryotic cell research, and if European judges find that this is the case, they may rule that Berkeley's patent covers the use of CRISPR-Cas9 technology in eukaryotic cells.

At the same time, this will also give Berkeley researchers an advantage that they do not have in the United States. Coombes believe that in fact, six research teams have successfully realized that CRISPR-Cas9 can work in a eukaryotic cell environment, and it also shows that the technology has obvious prospects in this field. Of course, they are also very motivated to do this. Nevertheless, this patent battle in Europe will not end so soon. Coombes speculate that this patent battle in Europe will drag on for at least 5 years, or even longer.

In addition, data from consulting firm IPStudies shows that there are currently 763 patents related to Cas9, some of which claim to have patents on certain CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing. Of course, over time, the owners of these patents may also try to assert their rights.

News source:http://news.bioon.com/article/6698541.html

This news was re-edited and reorganized by the Huaxun team and added analytical comments.