University of California to be granted CRISPR patent

The  University of California will soon be granted a patent related to the gene-editing technology CRISPR, according to a notice of allowance by the  US Patent and Trademark Office.

On Friday February 8, the USPTO issued a decision which said the patent will likely be granted to the university within eight weeks.

CRISPR is a technology that can be used to edit genes within organisms. It has a wide variety of applications which include the treatment of diseases, crop engineering and biological research.

“The issued patent will encompass the use of CRISPR-Cas9 technology in any cellular or non-cellular environment”, Eldora Ellison, a director at Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox and lead patent strategist on CRISPR matters for the University of California, said in a statement to  Reuters.

The decision is the latest development in a long-running rivalry between the university and the Broad Institute, which is a research centre associated with Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.

As it stands, the Broad Institute also holds patents for CRISPR.

The patent being approved stems from an application which was filed by microbiologists Jennifer Doudna of the University of California and Emmanuelle Charpentier of the University of Vienna in 2012.

The scientists filed the application after they discovered that CRISPR could be used to edit genomes in DNA plasmids.

Months later, a team at the Broad Institute also applied for their own patent relating to CRISPR and paid for a fast-track review process. They landed the first CRISPR patent in 2014.

In April 2015, The University of California filed a petition with the Patent and Trademark Office which challenged the validity of Broad Institute’s patents covering CRISPR technology, but the board rejected the petition.

Its decision was later upheld in September 2018 by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

David Cameron, a spokesman for Broad Institute, told Reuters that the new patent decision “does not affect the CRISPR patent estate held by Broad, MIT, and Harvard in any way”.

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