The court resolved the patent dispute over the rights to CRISPR/Cas9
Sofia Dolotovskaya, N+1
On February 15, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) decided on a patent dispute between the Broad Institute and the University of California at Berkeley (University of California, Berkeley) on the rights to the invention of the CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing system. According to the agency's conclusion, the patents of the two institutes do not overlap – which means the victory in the dispute of the Broad Institute and the retention of its CRISPR/Cas9 patents (Appeals board clears way for UC Berkeley to receive a patent on CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing).
The procedure for checking patents related to CRISPR/Cas9 for "interference" began in January 2016. Officials had to figure out which of the research groups holding similar patents should be given priority in creating the technology: the Broad Institute or the California Institute at Berkeley. The patent dispute was initiated by the California Institute, which demanded to verify the patents related to CRISPR/Cas9 obtained by the Broad Institute.
The first key work on the practical application of Cas9 for genome modification was published in late 2012 by a researcher at the Berkeley Institute of California Jennifer Doudna (Jennifer Doudna) together with Emmanuel Charpetier from Max Planck Institute of Infectious Biology. In the spring of the following year, Dudna filed a patent for this technology, but in the same year, many similar papers appeared from other researchers working on the same method. One of them, Feng Zhang from the Broad Institute, filed his own patent for CRISPR/Cas9 in October 2013. And although this happened after the filing of Dudna's patent, Zheng's patent passed through a simplified procedure and was issued first. The president of the Broad Institute (and its founder) at that time was Eric Lander, who also served as co-chairman of the Committee on Science and Technology in the Obama administration. His version of the history of the invention of genome editing technology can be found here.
The USPTO decision recognizing the absence of interference between the patents of the two institutes means the victory of the Broad Institute, which will now be able to retain all patents related to CRISPR/Cas9 technology. The California Institute said it "respects" the USPTO decision, but still believes that the rights to the invention of CRISPR/Cas9 technology belong to Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpettier. The Institute also noted that it is considering an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
The CRISPR/Cas9 system, which allows targeted editing of the DNA of different organisms, is based on an antiviral protection system for bacterial cells. The principle of its action is largely similar to RNA interference in eukaryotes: potentially viral sequences are recognized by special enzymes and destroyed. If in RNA interference the process triggers the detection of double-stranded RNA in the cell, then in the CRISPR/Cas9 system potentially dangerous sequences are compared with templates stored in special cassettes in the genome. Recognizes these sequences of Cas9 nuclease, which is directed by transcribed RNAs from cassettes. For the first time to discover these cassettes in the genome of bacteria (but not to explain their function) It was succeeded in 1987 by the Ishino group, much later Evgeny Kunin and colleagues found Cas genes associated with CRISPR cassettes, including the Cas9 nuclease.
CRISPR/Cas9 technology is being actively tested for the treatment of many genetic diseases. So, it was tested, for example, for the treatment of beta-thalassemia in human embryos, the removal of HIV genes from infected lymphocytes and the treatment of sickle cell anemia. In addition, scientists have recently developed a new CRISPR system that operates at the level of RNA, not DNA, and is able to specifically destroy the desired RNA using an RNA guide.
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16.02.2017