The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) ruled in an interference proceeding yesterday that The Broad Institute, Inc., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and President and Fellows of Harvard College (“Broad”) have priority over The Regents of the University of California, University of Vienna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier (“CVC”) with respect to who was first to invent the use of single-guide CRISPR-Cas9 genome engineering technology in eukaryotic cells.
As society adjusts to a new world of social distance and remote everything, rapid advancements in the digital, physical, and biological spheres are accelerating fundamental changes to the way we live, work, and relate to one another. What Klaus Schwab prophesized in his 2015 book, The Fourth Industrial Revolution, is playing out before our very eyes. Quantum computing power, a network architecture that is moving function closer to the edge of our interconnected devices, bandwidth speeds of 5G and beyond, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are all working together to accelerate innovation in fundamental ways. Given the global pandemic, in the biological sphere, government industrial policy drives the public sector to work hand-in-glove with private industry and academia to develop new therapies and vaccines to treat and prevent COVID-19 and other lethal diseases. This post will envision the future of gene editing technologies and the legal and ethical challenges that could imperil their mission of saving lives.
Right now, behind the walls of the USPTO, there is a fiery interference battle occurring between two scientific teams over who created a groundbreaking, DNA altering technique first. The victor stands to receive incredible gains. In one corner is a team of scientists from UC Berkeley headed by biologist Jennifer Doudna from the University of California, Berkeley and microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier from Umeå University in Sweden and the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin. In the other, a group led by synthetic biologist Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts.