A court recognizes the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT as the inventor of this tool, after a long legal battle
After a long legal battle in which billions of dollars are at stake, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has attributed the invention of the CRISPR gene editing technology , popularly known as the ‘scissors genetics’ , to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. In a decision that may seem paradoxical at first, the Nobel winners in 2020 for the creation of this tool, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna , are left without their patent in the US.
Charpentier and Doudna (represented in this race by the University of California Berkeley) presented the first evidence that the bacteria-derived CRISPR system – discovered by Spaniard Francis Mojica seven years earlier – could cut DNA in the journal ‘Science’ in June. from 2012.
They proposed it but they did not prove it. Seven months later, it was Feng Zhang, a neuroscientist at the Broad who is investigating the application of these tools in the treatment of psychiatric illnesses.
Charpentier’s group (today at the Max-Planck Institute for Infection Biology, in Berlin) and the universities of Berkeley and Vienna were the first to file the patent application in May 2012. The Broad followed a few months later, but they opted for an emergency procedure to be evaluated more quickly, for which they paid legally, and in 2014 they obtained the first tender. Of course, their opponents reacted and began a titanic legal battle whose last chapter made them losers on Monday. Shares of one of the Berkeley-related companies jumped 10%
Billions of dollars
“This is not as simple as saying some have won and others have lost. This patent is important because it is the first, but there are hundreds, if not thousands since there are many varieties of CRISPR”, explains Lluís Montoliu, a researcher at the National Center for Biotechnology. “What is going to happen is that the companies in the Berkeley orbit are going to have to renegotiate their non-exclusive licenses with the Broad or try to assert other patents that allow them to maintain their position,” he says.
In the orbit of the Broad is the company Editas, which since 2014 has maintained an exclusive joint license agreement to access CRISPR technology. Its executive director, James Mullen, acknowledged in a statement that both groups have made important contributions to gene editing but the USPTO’s decision “reaffirms the strength of our fundamental intellectual property.” Editas shares rose more than 10% on Monday. Meanwhile, in the orbit of Berkeley are the companies Intellia Therapeutics, co-founded by Doudna, or the Swiss-American CRISPR Therapeutics, of Charpentier.” The legal battle is very sad, they should have reached an agreement,” says Montoliu
Obviously, there are many interests at stake. Whoever owns the intellectual property rights to commercialize this technology can earn huge revenues worth billions of dollars and decide who will use it. But for Montoliu, this legal war “is very sad, it should not have happened. The two groups should have reached an agreement. It would always have been better than exposing yourself to receiving nothing, which is what can happen now », he thinks. “We would have avoided this soap opera and the (biotechnological and biomedical) applications would have been carried out with greater speed and legal certainty,” continues the researcher, who recalls that “these institutions have spent a lot of money on law firms.” In addition, these patents are granted for twenty years from the date of filing, so the winner will only be entitled to them for ten years. “Another ten have been consumed fighting,” he stresses.
Delays for therapies
CRISPR technology, which allows you to cut and paste DNA at will in a simple and efficient way, has endless uses, from agriculture to the recovery of disappeared species. But it is especially promising in the development of new therapies against cancer and terrible genetic diseases such as muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, Huntington’s disease, etc. The USPTO resolution will not affect ongoing scientific research, but it will affect the implementation of licenses for treatments, which must have a market price. “There are going to be delayed for sure,” says Montoliu. “It will probably slightly affect some companies that are completing clinical trials,” he says.
This is not necessarily the end of the dispute, as the losers could appeal it to a court. Furthermore, in Europe, the situation is the opposite. In March 2017, the European Patent Office granted the first patent on the continent to the group of Charpentier and Doudna.
