Webinar: Plenty to fight for in CRISPR IP battle

Despite a recent swing in momentum to the University of California (UC), it’s still too early to say who is likely to emerge triumphant in the CRISPR patent battle.

This is what emerged from a webinar jointly hosted by WIPR with  HGF on the CRISPR patent landscape, featuring  Claire Irvine and  Douglas Drysdale, who are both partners at HGF.

For anyone who hasn’t been following, UC, along with geneticist Emmanuelle Charpentier and the University of Vienna, is locked in a protracted battle with the Broad Institute for ownership of the foundational IP behind CRISPR-Cas9, the gene-editing tool with the potential to reshape medicine.

Each side claims to own the key patents underpinning CRISPR, which could be massively lucrative in the future.

But according to Irvine, it’s “still unclear who will be left holding the really essential patents when it comes to the commercial therapeutic use of CRISPR”.

The problem with making predictions as to which patents will prove the most valuable in future is that, as Drysdale said, CRISPR is such a rapidly evolving technology.

At the moment, Irvine said, it seems like two variant technologies known as base-editing and prime-editing are the ones coming to the fore.

Base-editing, Drysdale noted, is one of the most precise applications of CRISPR developed to date, but still relies on the foundational IP at issue in the Broad/UC fight.

The European Patent Office (EPO) last month, after a drama-filled week of hearings in Munich, revoked the Broad’s key foundational European patent, handing a significant boost to UC in that jurisdiction.

But the fight is far from over, especially in the US, where there is an ongoing interference proceeding between the parties.

“The Broad may have lost their key European patent, but have they lost the battle?” questioned Irvine, before outlining how an EPO oppositional hearing scheduled for September this year may prove vital to the institute’s fortunes.

Listen to  ‘Update on the CRISPR IP Saga’ on sister magazine WIPR’s dedicated channel, where you’ll find other webinars on a variety of key IP topics.