Legal Battle Ensues For New Gene-Editing Technology Backed By Bill Gates

Two sides adamantly fight over the patent rights for science's hottest breakthrough to date.

Editas Medicine, funded by Bill Gates and Google Ventures, is caught in a legal battle with MIT and the Broad Institute to fight for over intellectual property rights on CRISPR, a new gene-editing technology. Reportedly, this tech is worth hundreds of millions and even guarantees the most sought after Nobel Prize.

CRISPR or Cas9 is a technology that is able to cut and paste DNA of living organisms, including humans. Editas has announced plans to use this technology in humans by 2017 to treat a rare blindness disease. Jennifer Doudna of UC Berkeley, under Editas Medicine, and her team then filed the first CRISPR patent. However Feng Zhang of MIT and the Broad Institute later filed and paid to fast-track their application thus being awarded the patent, Business Insider reports.

This dispute ignited as a new US law for patent rights has taken effect on March 16, 2013. Previously the patent will be awarded to the "first to invent," however, this system was changed into "first to file." Now both teams fight over the gray areas of both circumstances.

As reported by Wired, Doudna's team filed their application on March 15, 2013, a day before the new "first to file" patent rules were actualized. Zhang's team filed their application on October 15 in the same year but claimed they had invented the technology on December 12, 2012, under the old rules. Additionally, the argument discusses on what the patent covers, whether on Doudna's claim in discovering the use of CRISPR to edit DNA or Zhang's claim in pioneering the specific use of CRISPR in cells that have a nucleus.

Currently, the two groups' lawyers continue fighting over this intense intellectual property battle. As it is, it will be up to the US Patent Office to determine who gets the credit for inventing CRISPR.

Tags

Bill Gates, CRISPR, gene-editing technology, Editas Medicine, MIT and the Broad Institute, Nobel Prize, Science

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