STAT+: Appeals court reopens the question of who owns patents for groundbreaking CRISPR discovery
A federal appeals court said the patent office made legal errors in awarding foundational patents for CRISPR-Cas9 to the Broad Institute
The now 13-year-long legal saga over who invented CRISPR took yet another unexpected turn on Monday, in a ruling that could not only change U.S. ownership of patent rights to the groundbreaking gene-editing technology but more broadly redefine how the law determines when an invention has been made.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit sided with the University of California and the University of Vienna in their bid to revive a fight over foundational CRISPR-Cas9 patents that the schools say should go to their Nobel Prize-winning scientists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier. In 2022, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office determined that a group of scientists led by Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had conceived of uses of the technology in humans before Doudna and Charpentier.
But a panel of appellate judges said that decision contained legal errors and sent the case back to the patent office’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board with instructions to revisit the case with a more expansive set of evidence. The ruling does not invalidate the Broad’s patents, which stand for now.
