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In a legal maneuver with billion-dollar implications, the University of California has asked the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office to decide who was first to invent a powerful gene-editing tool called CRISPR-Cas9.
In a request filed Monday, the regents of California’s public university system asked the patent agency to reconsider ten patents issued starting last year to the MIT/Harvard Broad Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, saying the hugely valuable rights should belong to them.
The technology, called CRISPR-Cas9, acts as a kind of molecular scissors, cutting and replacing DNA letters in an organism’s genome with exquisite precision and ease. The technique is revolutionizing the study of species from mice to potatoes, and is likely to open powerful new avenues in gene therapy to treat human disease as well (see “Genome Surgery”).
If the patent office approves it, the request for a “patent interference,” as the process is known, sets up a winner-takes-all challenge in which either the Broad Institute, or the University of California and two co-petitioners, including the University of Vienna, will come away with all...