UC, MIT Battle Over Patent to Gene-Editing Tool
By Lisa M. Krieger,
San Jose Mercury News
| 05. 09. 2015
Will the University of California reap the financial rewards of CRISPR's commercial use, likely worth billions of dollars? That's the source of a bitter fight.
In June 2012, UC Berkeley's Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, now a professor in Germany, showed how bacteria's natural defense system could be turned into a "gene editing" tool to cut DNA strands.
Seven months later, Feng Zhang of the Massachsuetts Institute of Technology, along with Harvard's George Church, showed that the tool also works in human cells.
UC and Doudna filed for a patent first. But in a shocking turn of events, MIT and Zhang won last month, earning the patent that covers use of CRISPR in every species except bacteria, including humans.
MIT paid extra to expedite Zhang's patent application. MIT and Zhang also assert that the patent belongs to them because Doudna didn't prove it works in human cells, only bacterial cells.
Zhang also submitted photos of lab notebooks showing his lab work was ahead of Doudna's.
UC and Doudna are fighting back, submitting thousands of pages of documentation to support their...
Related Articles
By Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 11.25.2024
Gig work in childcare, nursing, and transportation; non-invasive prenatal testing; gene editing; and space expeditions can all be attributed to one mistaken, pervasive assumption: that “we can innovate our way out of the thorniest problems, including reproductive ones” (22). In Reproductive Labor and Innovation: Against the Tech Fix in an Era of Hype, feminist political theorist Jennifer Denbow demonstrates why the U.S. has put so much of its hopes, and its money, on technological “innovations”––and why that hasn’t addressed...
By Tamsin Metelerkamp, Daily Maverick | 11.18.2024
The National Health Research Ethics Council (NHREC) has confirmed that heritable human genome editing (HHGE) remains illegal in South Africa, after changes in the latest version of the South African Ethics in Health Research Guidelines sparked concern among researchers that...
By Bernice Lottering, Gene Online | 11.08.2024
South Africa’s updated health-research ethics guidelines, which now include heritable human genome editing, have sparked concern among scientists. The revisions, made in May but only recently gaining attention, outline protocols for modifying genetic material in sperm, eggs, or embryos—changes...
By Arwa Mahdawi, The Guardian | 11.19.2024
Photo "Elon Musk Presenting Tesla's Fully Autonomous Future" by Steve Jurvetson on Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Is Elon Musk the dinner party guest from hell? It sure seems that way. Not only is the man desperate for people to...