Patent Fight Begins Over Revolutionary Biotechnology

A gene-editing technology called CRISPR-cas9 could revolutionize medicine and agriculture, and b­­­­e worth billions. But a major question remains: who owns it? U.S. patent judges will hear oral arguments this week to clarify the issue. “This is arguably the biggest biotechnology breakthrough in the past 30 or 40 years” Jacob Sherkow, a professor at the New York Law College, told NPR. CRISP-cas9 allows scientists to make precise changes to DNA, which would have major impacts on medical therapies, research tools and crop varieties. Research collaborators Jennifer Doudna at the University of California Berkeley and her European colleague Emmanuelle Charpentier, of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, are on one side of the dispute. In their patent filing, the two detailed how to use CRISPR for bacteria. But, in a later filing, Feng Zhang at the Broad Institute and MIT and Harvard filed a patent application detailing how CRISPR could be used in the cells of higher organisms. Zhang’s patent went through the process more quickly, and was issued first. But when UC Berkeley’s patent came up for a decision it created interference, and now ownership must be sorted out.