U.S. Appellate Judge Sides With Broad Institute in CRISPR Patent Case

In the latest tussle over lucrative patents covering the revolutionary gene-editing technology CRISPR-Cas9, an appeals judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said she would likely side with the Broad Institute.

Patents granted to the institute, MIT and Harvard were challenged in court by researchers from the University of California at Berkeley (UCB) and the University of Vienna, Austria who claim they were first to file a patent application in 2012.

After the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) ruled in February 2017 that CRISPR patents granted to the Broad Institute for use in eukaryotic cells would stand, UCB appealed the board’s decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C.