3Q: US patent office’s ruling on CRISPR
Last week, the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board issued an important decision in a dispute over intellectual property rights to the powerful gene-editing system known as CRISPR. Using this system, researchers can make changes to a cell’s genome more easily and with greater precision than they can with other approaches. The method has great potential to advance our understanding of the biology and treatment of human disease. The Broad Institute and MIT hold several foundational CRISPR-related patents based on research led by Feng Zhang, who is the James and Patricia Poitras Professor in Neuroscience at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT and a core member of the Broad Institute. Zhang is also an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences with a joint appointment in the Department of Biological Engineering. The University of California at Berkeley has also filed CRISPR-based patent applications, stemming from research led...