Harvard, MIT research team keeps gene-editing patent rights

The Broad Institute, a biological andgenomic research center affiliated with MIT and Harvard, willkeep valuable patents on a revolutionary gene-editing technologyknown as CRISPR, a U.S. patent agency ruled on Wednesday.

• The patent trap? Open science advocates want CRISPR technology to be free

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's Patent Trial andAppeal Board in Alexandria, Virginia, rejected a claim by arival team, associated with the University of California atBerkeley and University of Vienna in Austria, that they inventedthe technology first.

The patent rights could be worth hundreds of millions ofdollars, as the technology could revolutionize treatment of genetic diseases, crop engineering and other areas.

The University of California said in a statement that itwould consider an appeal of the ruling.

CRISPR works as a type of molecular scissors that can trimaway unwanted pieces of genetic material, and replace them withnew ones. Easier to use than older techniques, it has quicklybecome the preferred method of gene editing in research labs.

In 2012, a research team led by Berkeley's Jennifer Doudnaand Vienna's Emmanuelle Charpentier was first to apply for aCRISPR patent.

A team at MIT and Harvard, led by MIT professor Feng Zhang,applied for a patent months later, opting for a fast-track review process. It became the first to obtain a CRISPR patent in2014.

In April 2015, the Berkeley team petitioned the patentagency to launch a so-called interference proceeding, claiming the Harvard-MIT patents covered the same invention as theBerkeley team's earlier application.

Broad has countered that its patent represented the realbreakthrough because it described the use of CRISPR in plant andanimal cells for the first time.

The patent board's decision on Wednesday said there was " no interferencein fact" between Berkeley's patent application andBroad's patents, meaning both could be separately patentable.