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| Patent Office: 1924 |
UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna earned a Nobel Prize her lab’s work on Crispr-Cas9, a revolutionary method to edit DNA. But on Monday, UC lost its patent rights. Ending — for now — a long, vitriolic and expensive fight over commercial application of a pioneering tool that is transforming biological research, a board of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ruled on Monday that use of the genome editing technology in humans belongs to the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, not UC Berkeley. UC’s claims “are unpatentable,” according to the decision.
It’s a major blow for UC, representing a potential loss of $100 million to $10 billion in licensing revenues, according to Jacob Sherkow, a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law who studies the intersection of scientific innovation and patent law, regulation, and bioethics. While UC can keep what it’s earned so far, he said, it will be limited in the future.
“This means that a number of UC Berkeley’s patents that are directed to the canonical CRISPR system — when used in the cells of higher organisms, like humans — are not valid,” said Sherkow. “Some of them are still valid. But arguably a large swath of the most important ones, from a financial perspective, are not.”
Vowing to challenge the decision, Doudna said that “today’s USPTO ruling is surprising and contrary to what more that 30 countries and the Nobel Prize Committee have decided regarding the invention of CRISPR-Cas9 genome engineering technology for use in all cell types, including human cells.” In a statement, UC said that it was disappointed by the decision and believes that the board made a number of errors. UC retains rights to more than 40 other CRISPR-related patents that were not involved in this case, it said...
Full story at https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/02/28/uc-berkeley-loses-crispr-gene-editing-patent-case/.
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