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posted by martyb on Friday February 17 2017, @11:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the crispr-critters dept.

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 .


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 17 2017, @06:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 17 2017, @06:27PM (#468295)

    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?