Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • News
  • Published:

CRISPR patent estate splinters

Nature Biotechnology volume 35, pages 808–809 (2017)Cite this article

Subjects

A Correction to this article was published on 08 December 2017

This article has been updated

The lawyers representing the Charpentier–Doudna side face a difficult battle, as they need to convince the appeal court judges that the original USPTO appeal board's decision was legally flawed. “They are seeking to determine if there was an error in the application of the law,” says Mike Fuller, chair of the biotech practice group at Knobbe Martens, an intellectual property law firm based in Irvine, California. It is rare, however, for appeal judges to overturn the board's rulings. “They give a lot of deference to the decisions of the patent office,” Fuller says. Once the lawyers have completed their work, executives at the various companies associated with the two camps will likely hammer out a cross-licensing agreement.

Charpentier's and Doudna's companies, already share much of their intellectual property (IP) estate. Charpentier co-founded Zug, Switzerland–based CRISPR Therapeutics and Dublin-based ERS Genomics, and Doudna co-founded Cambridge, Massachusetts–based Intellia Therapeutics and Berkeley, California–based Caribou Biosciences. The companies recognize each other's IP rights and cooperate on maintaining those patents that are shared by Cambridge-based Editas Medicine, which Zhang co-founded, and that is, obviously, not a participant in this agreement. (Doudna was also a co-founder, but is no longer involved with the company.) Even so, with the intent of extending the technology's impact as widely as possible, the Broad Institute has recently thrown its weight behind an initiative to create a worldwide CRISPR–Cas9 licensing pool. The initiative, organized by MPEG LA, a packager of patent pools, would act as a one-stop shop for organizations seeking to incorporate patented CRISPR-based technology into their products. The Broad, along with Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both of Cambridge, and The Rockefeller University, of New York, have jointly submitted ten patent families for consideration to the Denver-based MPEG LA, which originally cut its teeth in developing a patent pool model for consumer electronics.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Relevant articles

Open Access articles citing this article.

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on Springer Link
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Change history

  • 12 October 2017

    In the version of this article initially published, the first two sentences of paragraph 2, on p.809, column 2, incorrectly stated that MilliporeSigma had received patent grants for the proxy-CRISPR technology, whereas it has filed patent applications for this technology. The sentences, which follow, have been replaced: “It was a 'dead' version of Cas9 that secured patent rights for the life sciences arm of Merck KGA. The Darmstadt, Germany–based pharma's wholly owned subsidiary MilliporeSigma, received both European and Australian patents for its 'proxy-CRISPR' version of the genome editing system.” The business has received an Australian patent grant and a notice of intention from the European Patent Office for a patent that covers the integration of an external DNA sequence into the chromosome of eukaryotic cells using CRISPR. In two instances in the same paragraph a “Merck” spokesperson should have been identified as being from “MilliporeSigma” and, similarly, “Merck claims” should have been “MilliporeSigma” claims. In addition, KGaA was misspelled as KGA; the third mention of “Neuman” was misspelled as “Newman.” The errors have been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dublin

    Cormac Sheridan

Authors
  1. Cormac Sheridan
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Sheridan, C. CRISPR patent estate splinters. Nat Biotechnol 35, 808–809 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt0917-808b

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt0917-808b

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing