UC Berkeley loses CRISPR gene editing patent case

UC Berkeley scientist Jennifer Doudna earned a Nobel Prize for her work on CRISPR-Cas9, a revolutionary method to edit DNA.

But her lab now has lost enormously lucrative patent rights to the tool.

Ending — for now — a long, vitriolic and expensive fight over commercial application of a pioneering tool that is transforming biological research, a board of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ruled on Monday that the patent for use of the genome-editing technology in humans belongs to the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, not UC Berkeley.

UC’s claims “are unpatentable,” according to the decision.

Article: link

As mentioned in our Beyond Bioethics reading, the University of California Berkeley's case for CRISPR has been halted.

The most striking portions of the paragraph to me are 

" The gene-editing tool gives scientists near godlike power, allowing them to rewrite the code of life by moving genes from one living creature to another. Doctors are now testing it as a cure for genetic disorders such as sickle cell disease, cancer and hereditary blindness."

The articles continues with

"Monday’s ruling throws a monkey wrench into the business model of several up-and-coming biotech companies, such as Caribou Biosciences of Berkeley and Boston’s Intellia Therapeutics and CRISPR Therapeutics, which aim to create treatments using CRISPR"

and ends with

"The litigation has been extremely expensive for both UC and Broad. Some experts have long urged the two universities to agree to a truce and share through what’s known as a cross-license agreement, the CRISPR spoils.

“Given the time to commercialization for medical therapies,” said Greely, “the eventual patent-owners seem, to me, unlikely to make profits nearly worth what they’ve spent in litigation.”"

This article raises questions on who has the rights to the sequenced information.

Who, if anyone, should have the rights to CRISPR? 

Would a free market allow monetary compensation to the appropriate geneticists?