Jacob Sherkow, an intellectual property attorney at the New York Law School in New York City, says the decision could be “a decisive knock out for the Broad.” He says he now expects UC to take the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Sherkow's back-of-the-envelope calculation puts that figure at "easily tens of millions" per year, or $100 million over the life of the patent. “The interference [hearing] is going ahead all the way this time to determine who was the first to invent,” says Catherine Coombes, a patent attorney at the U.K legal firm Murgitroyd who has not been involved in the case but handled other CRISPR litigation in Europe. And since the patent battle could determine just who gets the gigabucks expected from CRISPR, that’s where most of the public attention has been focused. “Although we are prepared to engage in the process before the PTAB and are confident these patents have been properly issued to Broad, we continue to believe it is time for all institutions to move beyond litigation and instead work together to ensure wide, open access to this transformative technology,” the statement says. “It’s worth thinking about whether it makes sense … to have patent rights on CRISPR,” says Lisa Larrimore Ouellette of Stanford Law School, “given that this is a technology that was developed with public funding.”, That view is shared by academic researchers such as Berkeley biologist Michael Eisen, who wrote in his blog in 2016 that “neither Berkeley nor MIT should have patents on CRISPR, since it is a disservice to science and the public for academic scientists to ever claim intellectual property in their work.”. The advance has created enormous excitement over its potential for curing or preventing genetic diseases, and galvanized an ethical debate over human genome editing. AAAS is a partner of HINARI, AGORA, OARE, CHORUS, CLOCKSS, CrossRef and COUNTER. This is exactly why I disregard people ignorantly claiming patents prevent innovation; in reality the opposite is true. 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But this is the patent world, and it involves an invention with potentially vast applications in agriculture, chemistry and medicine worth billions of dollars. Citigroup is fined $400 million, must seek U.S. approval for deals, The government cited Citi’s ongoing “failure to establish effective risk management and data governance programs and internal controls.”. The latest CRISPR patent … The patent board decision declared “Broad has persuaded us that the parties claim patentably distinct subject matter, rebutting the presumption created by declaration of this interference." Even if it passes legal muster, it threatens to turn off some customers. In contrast, a team led by the Broad’s Feng Zhang reported in the 3 January 2013 online edition of Science that it had used CRISPR to cut DNA in human cells, opening the door for the tool to be used in medicine. CVC subsequently filed new claims that led PTAB to declare a second interference. Not everyone expected the decision, and it has created a potentially even bigger muddle over who will get paid for what should the considerable hopes for the technology come to fruition. “But I’ve been wrong about settlement before so there’s every expectation that I’ll be wrong again.”. “These days, academic scientists also want to create their own companies,” Rai told me. Sherkow agreed UC's patent may fall short in this regard. All rights Reserved. A study of 660,000 Indians finds that a few individuals spread most new infections and that children transmit the coronavirus just as well as adults. By Sharon Begley @sxbegle. “There’s some language in the opinion from today that’s going to cast a long shadow over the ability of the [CVC] patents going forward.”. PTAB “has ruled in our favor in most instances and will continue with the interference proceeding to determine which party was the first to invent CRISPR in eukaryotes,” the statement says. “[W]e remain confident that the PTAB will ultimately recognize that the Doudna and Charpentier team was first to invent the CRISPR-Cas9 technology in eukaryotic cells.”, A statement issued by Broad calls for something akin to a peace treaty. Doudna and Charpentier’s patent says under claim 40 “The genetically modified cell of claim 38, wherein the cell is selected from the group consisting of: an archaeal cell, a bacterial cell, a eukaryotic cell, a eukaryotic single-cell organism, a somatic cell, a germ cell, a stem cell, a plant cell, an algal cell, an animal cell, in invertebrate cell, a vertebrate cell, a fish cell, a frog cell, a bird cell, a mammalian cell, a pig cell, a cow cell, a goat cell, a sheep cell, a rodent cell, a rat cell, a mouse cell, a non-human primate cell, and a human cell”. Doudna has been deeply thoughtful about the implications of her work for humankind and science itself. In Europe there isn’t really an equivalent process to interference (which results from the first to invent rather than first to file system in the US), but an entitlement dispute, where there is an argument about who owns the inventions, is possible. The protracted CRISPR patent fight took yet another turn when the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued a “notice of allowance” to UC Berkeley last month. "That's called an interference proceeding," Begley said of the legal maneuver. I would argue this is a lot tougher than the actual science. A statement from a UC spokesperson says it is “pleased” with the new ruling, noting that it denied several of Broad’s motions. “The game is not just academic recognition, but patents and start-ups.”. "Not until there's an actual commercialized therapy.".