China IP office upholds CRISPR/Cas9 patent owned by Dublin biotech firm
ERS Genomics, founded by CRISPR co-inventor Emmanuelle Charpentier, celebrates as China rejects invalidity challenges | News follows on heels of a similar Japan Patent Office decision.
The China National Intellectual Property Administration(CNIPA) has upheld a CRISPR/Cas9 patent belonging to Dublin-based biotech ERS Genomics, following invalidity proceedings contesting novelty and inventive step.
The CNIPA rejected both challenges to patentability, including maintaining that the priority application enabled uses of CRISPR/Cas9 in eukaryotic cells.
LSIPR was unable to confirm who brought the challenges of invalidity to the patent.
According to ERS, the CNIPA’s decision to fully uphold the patent “further demonstrates its validity and value as part of the patent collection for use of the CRISPR/Cas9 technology.”
Co-inventor of CRISPR/Cas9 technology, Emmanuelle Charpentier—along with the Regents of the University of California and University of Vienna (collectively known as CVC)—filed the patent in question (CN201380038920.6), which covers “Methods and Compositions for RNA-guided Target DNA Modification and for RNA-guided Transcription Regulation”.
The CNIPA decision comes three months after the Japan Patent Office(JPO) upheld ERS’ patent JP6692856, also part of the CVC portfolio, for the second time (the first being in 2021).
Michael Arciero, vice-president of Intellectual Property and Commercial Development at ERS said: “The decision by the CNIPA is testament to the strength of the foundational CVC CRISPR/Cas9 patent portfolio.
“Alongside the recent decision in Japan this demonstrates a global trend, and reinforces the importance of research organisations having the correct intellectual property rights in place when working with this technology.”
A Nobel-winning invention
French professor and researcher Emmanuelle Charpentier, and US chemist Jennifer Doudna, won the Nobel Prize in 2020 for their groundbreaking CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology.
CRISPR/Cas9 is described by ERS as “a powerful tool for the precise modification of gene sequences and the control and detection of gene expression.”
CRISPR (an acronym for ‘clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats’) “utilises a molecular complex [composed of] the protein Cas9, together with one or more guide RNAs, which can be targeted to a desired DNA sequence”.
Charpentier founded ERS “to provide broad access to the foundational CRISPR/Cas9 IP”, in the form of a direct licence from Charpentier. ERS says it holds 89 patents in more than 90 countries, with almost 150 licences currently in place worldwide.
In addition to the decision in China and Japan, ERS has successfully repelled challenges to its CRISPR/Cas9 patents in Europe. In 2020, for example, the European Patent Office (EPO) upheld European patent number EP2800811, and, a couple of years later, the EPO upheld a similar patent, number 3,401,400.
Conversely, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) delivered a blow to ERS when it ruled in 2022 that patents covering the CRISPR/Cas9 technology belonged to the Broad Institute, owned by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), rather than CVC.
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