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San Franisco — If you ask people who don’t follow biotech too closely what they know about CRISPR, you might get two answers: genetic editing and a big patent fight.
But a new CRISPR patent highlights a lower-profile potential use for the biotechnology: genetic detection and analysis.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted the patent Tuesday to Caribou Biosciences, the Berkeley, CA-based company cofounded by Jennifer Doudna, a University of California, Berkeley, one of the scientists whose work has been crucial in turning a bacterial defense system into one of this century’s most promising and contentious developments.
At the heart of the technology are DNA strands called CRISPR, short for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats,” and a so-called Cas enzyme that cuts DNA. Cas9 borrowed from the bacterium S. pyogenes is the enzyme most studied and used to date, but researchers are exploring CRISPR systems that use other enzymes. For simplicity, we will simply refer to the whole complex as “CRISPR” for the rest of this article.
The patent, first reported by Buzzfeed Tuesday, lists...