Are the Broad Institute’s CRISPR patents too broad?

The ability of the CRISPR/Cas9 system to make precisely targeted mutations in genes, including human genes, has taken the biotech industry by storm. It has been described by some as being the most important development in biology since the discovery of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick in 1953.

But whereas Watson and Crick famously celebrated their discovery in the traditional way in The Eagle pub in Cambridge, England, today’s inventors reach first for the telephone to call their patent attorneys.

So it was that Feng Zhang, a professor at the Broad Institute, and his group filed a number of US provisional applications to the CRISPR/Cas9 technology in 2012–2013 after realising the value of that technology for genome editing.

Subsequently, in May 2014, a European patent application (EP 2771468 A)was filed; a number of European patent divisional applications based on that first application have also been filed and four patents have now been granted by the European Patent Office (EPO) (see Table 1).

Table 1: Broad Institute’s granted CRISPR patents

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