Broad and DuPont yield CRISPR licensing deal in agriculture
The Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT has signed a patent licensing deal with DuPont Pioneer to provide CRISPR/Cas9 technology to agricultural researchers and producers.
Announced yesterday, October 18, the agreement paves the way for third parties to take on non-exclusive licences to IP owned by the parties.
The licences will be freely available to universities and non-profit organisations conducting academic research, the licensors said.
Neal Gutterson, vice president of research and development at DuPont Pioneer, a business unit of the agriculture division of DowDuPont, said the deal will result in a “wide array of benefits for the global food supply”, including higher and more stable yields of grains, fruits and vegetables for farmers.
Eric Lander, president and founding director of the Broad Institute, said he applauded DuPont Pioneer for its commitment to advancing research and commercialisation to accelerate progress in agriculture.
Under the agreement, licences will also be available to IP from the licences that Pioneer has itself signed with Caribou Biosciences, ERS Genomics and Vilnius University. Certain CRISPR technology applications, including for gene drive or tobacco products for human use, will be excluded from the deal.
The collaboration comes shortly after the Broad signed partnerships to tackle complex therapeutic challenges concerning unmet medical needs and boost the impact of technology on biological research.
In an article in September for LSIPR, Kevin O’Connor of Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg said the emergence of CRISPR as a gene-editing technology has generated a great deal of excitement in the scientific and medical communities.
“Potential applications may impact not only gene-editing research, but also the areas of industrial biotechnology and human therapeutics, where CRISPR technology may be developed and commercialised as gene- and/or cell-based therapeutics,” O’Connor wrote.
In the article he discussed proposals for a CRISPR patent licensing pool, saying the Broad had submitted ten patent families in order to determine their eligibility for participation in the pool.
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