LSPN Connect: CRISPR technologies
A lot of strides have been made in the field of CRISPR systems, and MilliporeSigma and Arbor Biotechnologies are at the heart of developments.
In an LSPN Connect session held yesterday, August 20, Millipore’s senior corporate patent counsel, Ben Sodey, and head of legal and IP at Arbor, Kelly Morgan, shared their insights on the latest developments in this area of gene editing technology.
In April, MilliporeSigma, the US life sciences business of Merck KGaA, secured a patent for its CRISPR-chrom technology, bringing its total number of CRISPR-related patents to 23.
Arbor was founded in 2016 by Broad Institute scientists Winston Yan, David Scott, and Feng Zhang, as well as David Walt of Harvard University, and operates a platform that discovers new nucleases.
In September last year, the US Patent and Trademark Office granted Arbor US patent number 10,392,616, based on Arbor’s discovery of Cas13d, a new member of the CRISPR-Cas13 enzyme family.
During the session moderated by LSIPR group editor Tom Phillips, Sodey and Morgan tackled a host of questions, including the direction of CRISPR technologies development in terms of patent applications, the key IP issues and the biggest challenges they face as in-house counsel in this arena.
They also discussed the role Arbor and Millipore are playing in the field, the long-running patent dispute between University of California, Berkeley and the Broad Institute, and how the crowded and still-growing field of CRISPR/Cas systems may pose a challenge for those seeking to patent their work.
Sodey explained that his company was determined to play a key role in the CRISPR fight, despite the obstacles placed by the global pandemic. He said: “It's pretty clear from the various filings, focusing specifically on the US and Europe, that we are very aggressively fighting the opposition against our patents. We’ve encountered a bit of a COVID-19 related delay. Opposition proceedings have been postponed largely until 2021.”
“It remains to be seen what will happen,” he added. “We are working very hard to ensure that people know that we have valuable IP.”
They also explored the potential for a patent pool or licensing framework within the CRISPR field. “That’s the direction we should be moving in," said Sodey. “There is an extraordinary amount of money spent being spent in this fight. The parties should look to come together rather than having an approach of ‘having all the marbles’ to yourself. My hope is that something can be worked out.”
According to Morgan, the patent landscape is changing which will hopefully leave less scope for confusion and disputes around broad-ranging patents. She explained that the patent claims were getting more narrow. “Nobody is going to be granted those large generic claims, such as what happened in the beginning [of the development of CRISPR technologies] – that is where you are seeing a lot of contention.”
They also spoke about the challenges of writing patent applications and anticipating future developments. Morgan said: “The hardest part of being an IP attorney is that you don't have a crystal ball…. the people you're working with assume you can make prophecies about what is going to happen. It’s difficult to capture all the different scenarios but you try to capture as much as you can.”
LSPN Connect is the membership programme for the Life Sciences—to watch on this session and for more information on joining, visit www.lspnconnect.com
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