Nobel Prize winners convince court to revive CRISPR patent dispute

By Blake Brittain

May 12 (Reuters) - The University of California and the University of Vienna on Monday convinced a U.S. appeals court to revive their bid for patent rights to groundbreaking CRISPR gene-editing technology created by their Nobel Prize-winning scientists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier.

The decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit was a win for the schools in a long-running dispute over CRISPR patent rights with the Broad Institute, a joint venture of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The U.S. Patent Office had previously determined that Broad Institute scientists conceived the technology before Doudna and Charpentier.

The Federal Circuit on Monday said that the office had misapplied federal law on patent conception and sent the case back to the Patent Office's Patent Trial and Appeal Board for reconsideration.

A Broad Institute spokesperson said the institute was confident that the board will "again confirm Broad's patents, because the underlying facts have not changed."

Spokespeople and an attorney for the University of California and the University of Vienna did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

CRISPR enables scientists to use biological "scissors" to edit DNA. The technology is being tested in clinical trials to help cure diseases caused by genetic mutations and abnormalities.

The University of California's Doudna and Charpentier of the University of Vienna were first to seek a CRISPR patent in 2012. They shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their CRISPR work eight years later.

The Broad Institute applied for its own patent covering the use of CRISPR in "eukaryotic" plant or animal cells in 2013 and received the patent in 2014. Doudna, Charpentier and their universities challenged the institute at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, arguing they came up with the same invention first.

The board determined in 2022 that the Broad Institute was entitled to the patent rights, finding that the challengers had not created CRISPR technology that works with eukaryotic cells before the institute invented it.

The universities argued in the appeal that their teams "conceived of and described every element of the invention before the Broad Institute's first alleged conception."

The Federal Circuit ruled for the Broad Institute in a related case in 2018.

The case is Regents of the University of California v. Broad Institute, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, No. 22-1653.

For the universities: Jeffrey Lamken of MoloLamken

For the Broad Institute: Raymond Nimrod of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan

Read more:

Breakthrough gene-editing technology belongs to Harvard, MIT -U.S. tribunal