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The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has won a CRISPR-Cas9 patent fight against University of California Berkeley, but UC Berkeley expects to be awarded a broader patent anyway:
The CRISPR patent fight appears to be over, at least for the moment. A ruling by the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board found no "interference" in patents awarded to Feng Zhang at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. The loser, pending appeals, is the University of California, and the much-heralded biochemist Jennifer Doudna, who, along with Emmanuelle Charpentier, in 2012 published a groundbreaking paper showing how to exploit a natural bacterial gene-editing system known as CRISPR. The patent office determined that Zhang's later innovations, which used CRISPR to edit mammalian cells, were not simply elaborations of what Doudna and Charpentier had already discovered.
In a teleconference with reporters Wednesday, Doudna did not sound deterred by the ruling, saying she will press forward with her own patent application based on the earlier work. "Our patent will likely be issued," she said. She explained that her patent would cover the use of CRISPR in all cells, while the Zhang patent would more narrowly cover applications of CRISPR in plant and animal ("eukaryotic") cells. She drew an unusual analogy: "They will have a patent on green tennis balls. We will get a patent on all tennis balls." Such a situation could potentially make attractive some kind of settlement between the institutions and the inventors to distribute the money from CRISPR licenses.
UC Berkeley statement. Also at STAT, Science Magazine , The Mercury News , and The New York Times .
(Score: 4, Insightful) by BsAtHome on Friday February 17 2017, @11:46AM
Why is there a patent on biological systems, their constituents and operational modalities in the first place? The mechanism is not invented by humans, only its application in a very specific way. Nature uses all of its resources and would probably, somewhere, have a non-technically based application of the same procedure. As they say, nature will find a way.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by curunir_wolf on Friday February 17 2017, @12:01PM
I am a crackpot
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 17 2017, @04:43PM
Also, why do colleges get to claim exclusive profits from a discovery paid for by taxpayers?
In the case of a public university, what's the problem? It isn't like the money is going to private investors. Its going to fund that university's operation, so it is effectively being paid to the taxpayers.
As for harvard and mit, being private schools well its more complicated. How much of the work was funded by public grants? I don't know. But even then, both are non-profits so the money is still going back into the school's operation. It just doesn't have (as much) public oversight.
If you want to complain about taxpayer funding of private profits, look at all the contractor companies working on government programs like NASA which get to keep the patents on the work they do for the government.
(Score: 2) by pgc on Friday February 17 2017, @05:55PM
The problem is simple. If it was payed for by the people, then no university should have the right to claim it as their own, since it isn't. It is everyone's.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 17 2017, @06:27PM
If the problem is simple, the answer sure isn't.
You want the money to go into the general fund?
Doesn't it make more sense that the people who made the best use of the original money should continue to direct the spending of the results? Isn't that the principle of small government? That the people who know best how to spend the money are the one's closest to the issue?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 17 2017, @03:32PM
The use of CRISPR to specifically edit genomes is a non-obvious and non-natural process. CRISPR is naturally a destructive process to defend the cell against foreign DNA (similar to restriction enzymes, but with a type of immunological memory). Horizontal gene transfer occurs through a variety of mechanisms, some of which are delebrate and some that aren't, and the mechanisms of CRISPR do not fit with the rest in a natural setting.