CRISPR patent dispute may finally be resolved

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. 

Who owns the biggest biotech advance of the century? Geneticists in Boston may have found a way around a high-stakes patent dispute over one of the most significant biotechnology breakthroughs in recent years, a gene-editing tool called CRISPR.

CRISPR is faster, easier and cheaper than other gene editing techniques. It works in nearly everyone’s hands, democratising the pursuit of tweaking genes, which can be used for everything from breeding better plants to developing treatments for leukemia or HIV infections.

But the technology is embroiled in a patent dispute between researchers in California and Massachusetts.

Researchers Jennifer Doudna at the University of California in Berkeley and Emmanuelle Charpentier at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, Germany, filed the first patent on CRISPR, dated December 2012. But it was Feng Zhang at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard who was granted the patent, although he filed in October 2013. Zhang and the Broad Institute paid to expedite their patent and were the first to show that the tool works in human cells.

Now, Zhang has announced a potential way to resolve the dispute: his team has identified two novel DNA-slicing enzymes that aren’t covered by any of the previous patents and that can replace the one at the centre of the legal spat. Zhang’s team has used the enzymes to successfully edit human genomes. The discovery could potentially sidestep the patent dispute: it offers a different way to perform CRISPR gene editing.

Read full, original post: DNA-cutting enzymes could slice through gene editing patent spat

 

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