This Court Battle Will Decide Who Will Make a Fortune From Gene-Editing Tech
Scientists have used the breakthrough gene-editing technology CRISPR to create advances in medicine and agriculture, from ways to eliminate sickle-cell anemia to growing mushrooms that resist browning.
Scientists have used the breakthrough gene-editing technology CRISPR to create advances in medicine and agriculture, from ways to eliminate sickle-cell anemia to growing mushrooms that resist browning.
But the battle over who will make money from it is just beginning.
On Monday, some of the most well-known research institutions in the world __ including University of California at Berkeley and the Broad Institute, which is affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University __ face off in an appeals court in Washington over the question of who invented and thus can profit from the technology.
CRISPR, or Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, uses a defense mechanism employed by bacteria to target parts of a gene and cut them out like a pair of molecular scissors. It has already triggered a revolution in the world of genetics by making it easier to manipulate the building blocks of living organisms. The CRISPR breakthrough may one day lead to a Nobel Prize.
What’s unclear is who will reap the potential windfall on royalties for commercial applications in medicines, health treatments and improved foods.
“I’m a company and I want to practice CRISPR, who do I license, who do I pay?” said Kevin Noonan, a biotechnology lawyer with McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff in Chicago.
Universities and start-up companies primarily in the U.S. and China are ramping up research using CRISPR. Since 2013, patents have been sought on more than 2,500 CRISPR-related inventions, according to Swiss researchers.
One of them, CRISPR-Cas9, is a naturally-occurring enzyme used by bacteria to rid itself of viruses and was first discovered decades ago.
Researchers with UC Berkeley and the University of Vienna were first to find ways to guide those molecular scissors to targeted locations on the genome and say their work could be used for any living thing. They filed their patent application in 2012 and have called it “the discovery of the century.”
The Broad Institute in Massachusetts, set up by groups including MIT and Harvard to experiment with the human genome, said the UC Berkeley team only showed how the technology would work in a test tube. They said their research team proved CRISPR-Cas9 could work in plants and animals, including humans.
The arguments Monday before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit involve the race to patent CRISPR technology. By paying an extra $70 fee, Broad got an accelerated review of its patent applications, which were issued while the application from UC Berkeley was still pending.
UC Berkeley objected, telling the patent office that its application covered all the work Broad claims to have invented. Last year, the patent office disagreed, saying the inventions were different enough that both could get patents. UC Berkeley appealed. A decision expected later this year.
UC Berkeley’s lawyer Donald Verrilli said in a statement on Monday that Broad’s team, led by Feng Zhang, were among six groups including UC that used “conventional, off-the-shelf tools to employ CRISPR-Cas9” in plant and animal cells.
UC Berkeley scientist and co-inventor Jennifer Doudna described the patent office ruling after it was released as saying “our patent will be for all tennis balls and Broad’s will be for green tennis balls.” The reason UC Berkeley objects is because those green tennis balls could be where the money is.
“Human therapeutics is really the money maker here,” said Michael Stramiello, a patent lawyer with Paul Hastings in Washington. “The parties involved would like to have a stake there. Certainly in California’s mind, it doesn’t really want to share rights there. If someone ends up with the lion share of rights, that’s extremely valuable.”
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