USPTO Revives Fight Over CRISPR Patents

Life Sciences Intellectual Property Review reports, “The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has revived the dispute between the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) over which first invented the CRISPR gene-editing technology.

Yesterday, June 25, the USPTO said it would conduct an interference proceeding between 13 patents and one application to the Broad Institute and ten patent applications filed by UC Berkeley, all covering the use of CRISPR/Cas9 in eukaryotic cells.”

Referencing client The University of California, Berkeley, Director Eldora L. Ellison, Ph.D. is quoted in the coverage saying, “The initiation of this interference proceeding highlights that previous decisions involving the Broad did not determine who was the first to invent this technology, and it lays out a pathway for resolving this important issue.”