Posts Tagged: "gene editing"

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.

On Tuesday, June 24, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) declared an interference proceeding  between a collection of entities that are on opposing sides in the race to commercialize CRISPR-Cas9 genomic editing technologies. The patent interference will decide if inventors from the Regents of the University of California, the University of Vienna and the Umea University of Sweden were the first to invent certain methods for gene editing in eukaryotic cells, or plant and animal cells, that are covered by patent claims which have been issued to the Broad Institute, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard College. The patent interference involves 10 patent applications that have been filed by the University of California group and 13 patents that have been filed by the Broad Institute group. These two groups have been facing off in a series of legal battles regarding which side can properly claim to be the rightful inventor of perhaps the world’s most widely applicable gene editing technology useful for treating diseases, improving life science research and increasing the rate of biotechnology innovations.

England isn’t the only part of the world where embryonic gene editing research has been finding a foothold. In early 2015, researchers out of China published a paper reporting experiments in using CRISPR-Cas9 to edit a specific gene in an embryo’s genetic code responsible for a potentially life-threatening blood disorder. The research team found serious obstacles that need to be addressed before CRISPR-Cas9 can be used to edit genetic code in an embryo on a wide scale; these issues include low retention of genetic material and unintended mutations when a Cas9 enzyme misses its target.