UC Berkeley loses CRISPR patent case

Illustration by Alex Castro / The VergeMIT and Harvard’s Broad Institute was the first to apply the gene-editing tool CRISPR to human cells, the US Patent and Trademark Office said Monday. The decision stymies years of efforts from the University of California, Berkeley to obtain lucrative patent rights to the technology. UC Berkeley is home to Jennifer Doudna, who won a 2020 Nobel Prize with Emmanuelle Charpentier for discovering the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technique.
It also complicates the work of some biotech companies to develop gene-editing therapies based on CRISPR: many, including companies like Caribou Biosciences (co-founded by Doudna) and Intellia Therapeutics, which licensed the CRISPR tech from the UC Berkeley group.
“This decision once again confirmed Broad’s…

Continue reading…