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That’s a real nice CRISPR cure you have there. It would be a pity if anything happened to it.
Okay. Drop the tough-guy accent and toss the black fedora aside. But I do believe that similar conversations could be occurring now that a historic gene-editing cure is coming to market, as soon as this year.
By the middle of December, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, based in Boston, is expected to receive FDA approval to sell a revolutionary new treatment for sickle-cell disease that’s the first to use CRISPR to alter the DNA inside human cells. (Vertex has already received regulatory approval in the UK.)
The problem is that the US patent on editing human cells with CRISPR isn’t owned by Vertex—it is owned by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, probably America’s largest gene research center, and exclusively licensed to a Vertex competitor, Editas Medicine, which has its own sickle-cell treatment in testing.
That means Editas will want Vertex to pay. And if it doesn’t, Broad and Editas could go to the courts to claim patent infringement, demand royalties and...