In battle for CRISPR patents, court grants MIT and Harvard a legal victory over UC Berkeley



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The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard won a long battle Legal battle with the University of California on patents that she holds related to gene editing technology.

The University of California argued that Broad's patented research was an "obvious" extension of Berkeley's earlier research that Broad should not have received his patents. A federal court of appeal in the District of Columbia disagreed, ruling on Monday that Broad's work was sufficiently original.

The dispute involved the search for a gene editing technique known as short palindromic repeats grouped at regular intervals, or CRISPR for short. Berkeley researchers led by Jennifer Doudna published a 2012 article in which they demonstrated CRISPR's ability to edit DNA outside cells in test tubes. Extensive researchers led by Feng Zhang then published a 2013 article showing success with the same technique in human cells.

Broad then received a dozen patents related to his work. The University of California appealed these patents to the US Patent and Trademark Office, arguing that Mr. Zhang's investigations were an "obvious" continuation of Doudna's and that they did not. were therefore not patentable.

The Patent Office took precedence over Broad last year; Monday's court decision upheld the decision of the patent office.

"The Federal Circuit has made the right decision in upholding the decision of the US District Court and Appeals Board," the Broad Institute said in a statement. "The patents and applications of Broad Institute and UCB are about different topics and do not interfere with each other, it's time for all institutions to go beyond litigation. ensure open and wide access to this transformative technology. "

In the opinion of the court, Judge Kimberly Moore explained that "a determination of the obviousness requires the finding that a person skilled in the art would have been motivated to combine or modify the teachings of the state of the art and would have reasonably hoped to succeed then. "

The court ruled that the advancement of Berkeley's research by Broad was not a trivial matter, highlighting the published statements in which Doudna herself acknowledged "many frustrations" in making the edition work. of CRISPR genes in human cells. Doudna added that this would represent a "deep discovery".

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