(Reuters) — The Broad Institute, a biological and genomic research centre affiliated with MIT and Harvard, will keep valuable patents on a revolutionary gene-editing technology known as CRISPR, a U.S. patent agency ruled recently.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board in Alexandria, Virginia, rejected a claim by a rival team, associated with the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Vienna in Austria, that it invented the technology first.
The patent rights could be worth billions of dollars because the technology could revolutionize treatment of genetic diseases and the genetic modification of crops.
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Intellia Therapeutics Inc., which has a licensing deal with the University of California, said it would work on legal strategy with the University of California but that it was too early to comment on next steps.
The University of California said it would consider an appeal of the ruling, which would go to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C.
Katrine Bosley, chief executive officer of Editas Medicine Inc., a biotechnology firm that licenses CRISPR-related intellectual property from Broad, said the company was pleased with the decision.
CRISPR works as a type of molecular scissors that can trim away unwanted pieces of genetic material and replace them with new ones.
Easier to use than older techniques, it has quickly become the preferred method of gene editing in research labs.
In 2012, a research team led by Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna and Vienna’s Emmanuelle Charpentier was first to apply for a CRISPR patent.
A team at Broad, led by MIT’s Feng Zhang, applied for a patent months later, opting for a fast-track review process. It became the first to obtain a CRISPR patent in 2014 and has since obtained additional patents.
In April 2015, Berkeley petitioned the patent agency to launch an interference proceeding, claiming the Harvard-MIT patents covered the same invention as its earlier application.
Broad has countered that its patent represented the real breakthrough because it described the use of CRISPR in eukaryotic cells, which include plant and animal cells, for the first time.
The patent board’s decision said there was “no interference in fact” between Berkeley’s patent application and Broad’s patents, meaning Berkeley’s application could still be granted.
However, major commercial applications of CRISPR are likely to be in eukaryotic cells.
In addition to Editas, which was co-founded by Zhang and Doudna, who has since left the company, Broad has licensed its CRISPR technology to Monsanto and General Electric’s medical technology subsidiary, GE Healthcare.
