In the wake of big patent decision, it’s business as usual for CRISPR therapy developers
Earlier this month, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ruled that CRISPR patents key to developing human therapies belong to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, ending the latest chapter in a bitter seven-year battle between the Broad and the home institutions of Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier — the two scientists who won the Nobel Prize for creating the revolutionary gene-editing technology.
But for all the acrimony exchanged and millions of dollars of legal fees spent by the academic institutions where CRISPR was first invented, the companies that are actually turning the technology into medicines are plowing through the fallout of the decision with little more than a collective shrug.
