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Genome editing has always been a subject of great promise, but also of great tension. This generated a lot of attention, but nothing on the ground seemed as revolutionary as short and evenly spaced palindromic repetitions (CRISPR). This new technology promises to eradicate diseases, improve crop yields and produce new materials with incredible characteristics. In addition to that, it is extremely affordable and affordable.
It was only around the mid-2000s that the researchers discovered CRISPR while they were studying bacterial defense mechanisms, including how bacteria handle plasmids and foreign phages. Bacteria can open up and change the genome of invading viruses with a nuclease called Cas9, rendering them inactive. In 2012, Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley and Emmanuelle Charpentier of Umea University discovered the possibility of reprogramming CRISPR-Cas9 to target specific regions of the genome. In 2013, Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of Mbadachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard adapted this technology to target the human genome. Since then, interest has continued to grow among the public as well as companies and scientists. It is difficult to predict the future of a technology that is still so young, but the activity in the patent field seems promising.
In order to identify patents related to CRISPR, the IPlytics platform database was used to perform a comprehensive keyword search of patents filed worldwide in the CRISPR field. The research was based on the content of the patent (title, abstracts, description and claims), using state-of-the-art semantic indexing and development methods. Figure 1 illustrates the number of patent applications per year between 2008 and 2018. Since 2015, the number of applications has more than quadrupled. The CRISPR genome edition could shape the future of biotechnology, agriculture and pharmaceuticals, and the data show an impressive growth trend that could be an indicator.
In order to identify the ownership of patents, IPlytics has aggregated patents with respect to each company's patent portfolio, using disambiguation techniques of entities. In addition, patent applications were counted against the corresponding patent family to determine the number of unique patented inventions per company. Figure 2 shows that Pioneer Hi-Bred International, Monsanto and the University of California are the main patent holders. In addition, six of the top 10 patent holders are universities, which makes sense for early-stage technology such as CRISPR. Apart from Cellectis, which is French, the top 10 patent holders are all based in the United States. As a result, the results confirm a very US-centric patent landscape.
To identify the patent office where the patents were filed, IPlytics counted the CRISPR patents against the jurisdiction of the Office. Figure 3 shows that most CRISPR patents were filed in the United States, followed by the European Union and China. The number of patents filed in the United States exceeds the number of patents filed with the following three patent offices, further highlighting the predominance of patent filing activity in the United States.
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