The Battle Over CRISPR Could Make Or Break Some Biotech Companies
By Farai Chideya,
FiveThirtyEight
| 01. 25. 2016
[cites CGS' Marcy Darnovsky]
Untitled Document
When is $100 million not $100 million? When it’s a proxy, maybe even something akin to a bet.
The nice, round figure is the target initial public offering value for Editas Medicine, a biotechnology firm with a mission of using gene editing to treat disease. The company has already raised more than $160 million from investors, and initial evaluations of the IPO said it was almost certain to be exceeded when the stock started trading publicly.
But Editas could face a big problem. The company has hitched its fortunes to CRISPR, a revolutionary gene-editing technology embroiled in concerns over ethics and, most immediately, a patent dispute. Editas licensed the technology in 2014 from the patent holder, scientists from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, as part of its research into genomic medicine, including cancer immunotherapies. But earlier this month, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office accepted a challenge to the Broad Institute group’s patent from the University of California, which is backing a rival group of scientists. Without licensing from the eventual winner of the...
Related Articles
By Riley Beggin and Jeff Stein, The Washington Post | 08.03.2025
The White House does not plan to require health insurers to provide coverage for in vitro fertilization services, two people with knowledge of internal discussions said, even though the idea was one of President Donald Trump’s key campaign pledges.
Last...
By Sayantani DasGupta, MedPage Today | 08.05.2025
It's just a jeans ad.
It's not that deep.
It's just social media outrage.
Should physicians care about the recent American Eagle "Sydney Sweeney Has Good Genes Jeans" controversy? What, if anything, does the provocative campaign have to...
By Editors, Nature | 08.15.2025
A technology that played a key part in saving millions of lives during the COVID-19 pandemic1 should be feted to the skies. Instead, US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr announced last week that the US federal government is...
By Staff, National Women's Law Center | 08.13.2025
INTRODUCTION
Baby bonuses. Motherhood medals. Fertility tracking. You may have heard of these policy proposals as solutions from the Trump administration to help encourage women to have more children.
Besides falling short of ensuring that people have what they need...