Federal court reopens question of who owns key CRISPR patents

Megan Molteni reviews on discoveries from the frontiers of genomic medication, neuroscience, and reproductive tech. She joined STAT in 2021 after masking well being and science at WIRED. You may attain Megan on Sign at mmolteni.13.

The now 13-year-long authorized saga over who invented CRISPR took yet one more sudden activate Monday, in a ruling that might not solely change U.S. possession of patent rights to the groundbreaking gene-editing expertise however extra broadly redefine how the regulation determines when an invention has been made.

The U.S. Courtroom of Appeals for the Federal Circuit sided with the College of California and the College of Vienna of their bid to revive a combat over foundational CRISPR-Cas9 patents that the faculties say ought to go to their Nobel Prize-winning scientists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier. In 2022, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Workplace decided {that a} group of scientists led by Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how had conceived of makes use of of the expertise in people earlier than Doudna and Charpentier.

However a panel of appellate judges mentioned that call contained authorized errors and despatched the case again to the patent workplace’s Patent Trial and Enchantment Board with directions to revisit the case with a extra expansive set of proof. The ruling doesn’t invalidate the Broad’s patents, which stand for now.