According to an article published in Nature, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has
ruled that the Broad Institute of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Mass., could keep its patents on using CRISPR–Cas9 in eukaryotic cells. This was a key verdict in the battle over the intellectual property rights to the potentially lucrative gene-editing technique CRISPR–Cas9.
The University of California, Berkeley, which had filed its own patents and had hoped to have the Broad Institute’s thrown out, lost a battle that dates back to 2012. That’s when Jennifer Doudna at U.C. Berkeley, Emmanuelle Charpentier, then at the University of Vienna, and their colleagues outlined how CRISPR–Cas9 could be used to precisely cut isolated DNA. In 2013, Feng Zhang at the Broad Institute and his colleagues—and other teams—showed how it could be adapted to edit DNA in eukaryotic cells such as plants, livestock, and humans.
U.C. Berkeley filed for a patent earlier, but the USPTO granted the Broad Institute’s patents first, which it upheld in the recent ruling. The holder of key patents could make millions of dollars from CRISPR–Cas9’s applications in industry. Now, U.C. Berkeley has two months to appeal the USPTO’s ruling, which centered on the fact that the Broad Institute’s patents specified how CRISPR could be adapted for use in eukaryotic cells while U.C. Berkeley’s didn’t. This is why the USPTO ruled that the Broad Institute’s patents would not interfere with the granting of U.C. Berkeley’s, and so should be allowed to stand.
U.C. Berkeley, however, has argued that if its patent is granted in its current state, it would cover the use of CRISPR–Cas9 in any cell. That, the team says, would mean someone wanting to sell a product made using CRISPR–Cas9 in eukaryotic cells would need to license patents from both U.C. Berkeley and the Broad Institute.