Who owns CRISPR?

Abstract

“They have a patent on green tennis balls; we will have a patent on all tennis balls.” That is how Jennifer Doudna, professor of chemistry and of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, reacted to the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s recent ruling that Broad Institute, a research center affiliated with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gets to retain more than a dozen patents that had been granted for the use of the technique known as CRISPR ( see page 7). Short for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats,” CRISPR is a way of editing DNA in the cells of humans, other animals, and plants. Doudna was credited as an inventor of the gene-editing technology for work she did with Emmanuelle Charpentier, who used to be based at the University of Vienna but is now director of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology. The pair,