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A Federal Court of Appeal rejected arguments that UC Berkeley has exclusive patent rights for the powerful CRISPR gene editing tool, looking at the future benefits of the University through a technique that allows scientists to to modify the genetic sequences.
The US Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington on Monday upheld an earlier ruling that patents held for inventions by the Broad Institute affiliated with Harvard University were different from those covered by UC's claims and did not make any difference. did not interfere.
The transformation technique was designed by Jennifer Doudna, cell biologist at UC Berkeley, but improved by Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute.
This means Broad can retain its patents and continue to share technology with many licensees, including Editas Medicine of Cambridge, MA.
In response, "we are evaluating alternative litigation options," said Charles F. Robinson, UC President's Office, suggesting an appeal to the US Supreme Court or the Court of Appeal. American for the federal circuit.
"It's time for all institutions to go beyond litigation," the Broad Institute said in a statement. "We should work together to ensure broad and open access to this transformative technology."
UC challenged a dozen broad-based CRISPR-based patents, claiming that their discoveries overlapped. The university has spent millions of dollars in the fight, a cost reimbursed by biotech caribou biosciences, based in Berkeley, which has licensed this tool.
But the Broad Institute did not agree – and has fought to keep his patents valuable.
In April, the US Patent and Trademark Office's First Instance and Patent Appeal Board sided with Broad, ruling that there was "no de facto interference". which means the use of CRISPR in plant and animal cells is patentable separately, he concluded.
UC has won less important but still important victories in the multi-fronts war for rights over CRISPR-Cas9 technologies. He obtained a patent covering the use of editing short genome regions of 10 to 15 nucleotides. Nucleotides are the 3 billion letters that write the book of the life of the genome. She also holds a patent to publish genetic material called single-stranded RNA.
CRISPR, or short palindromic repeats grouped together regularly, allows scientists to identify any gene sequence in any cell and cut it – and sometimes even fix it.
In mid-2012, while studying the inner workings of bacteria, Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier of Max Planck University for Infection Biology created a way to use CRISPR in simple cells.
Six months later, Zhang published research showing that it could be used in plant and animal cells, including humans.
Also Monday, UCSF's Gladstone Institutes announced that Doudna would open a laboratory on its San Francisco campus, where she will lead new collaborations that will help apply this groundbreaking technique to human diseases – a new field of medicine called genomic surgery ". modify or modify the harmful genes.
According to the STAT Bioscience Journal, Monday's decision focused on two key points: was Broad's work in mammalian cells "obvious" in the light of Doudna's work on bacteria and whether Broad had "an expectation" reasonable of success ".
UC wanted Broad's patents to be overturned, arguing that researchers were simply using "classic tools" to use Berkeley's innovation.
In his ongoing fight, Robinson said, "We are eager to prove that Drs. Doudna and Charpentier invented for the first time the use in plant and animal cells – a fact already widely recognized by the global scientific community – while several pending patent applications involving the use of CRISPR- Cas9 in plant and animal cells are ongoing. examination by the patent office.
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