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As this magazine and others have detailed, CRISPR-Cas9 — the powerful gene-editing technology being hailed as molecular biology’s “holy grail”—is the subject of a contentious dispute between the widely celebrated Jennifer Doudna at the University of California, Berkeley, and wunderkind Feng Zhang at the Broad Institute and MIT.
The central question: who invented it first?
That dispute became official in the eyes of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office when an administrative patent judge officially declared an “interference” between Doudna’s pending patent application and a dozen of Zhang’s already issued patents. The interference proceeding sets up a legal showdown that may strip Zhang of his patents and see the two scientists deposed under oath.
Related on the SLP
Even among patent attorneys — generally, friends of the arcane and hypertechnical — interference proceedings are famous for their complexity. The U.S. patent office now grants patents on a “first to file” basis. But before 2013 this was not the case. Historically, U.S. patent law instead recognized that patent rights should go to whoever could prove they were “first to invent” an idea. Because there is a lag between when patent applications are filed and when they are issued — roughly, three years — this gave rise to the possibility that a later inventor could be awarded a patent before the patent office had time to process an earlier inventor’s application. In that circumstance, the later inventor’s patent “interferes” with the earlier inventor’s ability to rightfully obtain theirs.
Read full, original post: CRISPR Dispute to Be Decided by Patent Office
