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From what I understand, the Broad patents are free to license for academic community and not free for industry. https://www.broadinstitute.org/partnerships/off

From what I understand, the Broad patents are free to license for academic community and not free for industry. https://www.broadinstitute.org/partnerships/office-strategic-alliances-and-partnering/information-about-licensing-crispr-cas9-syste https://www.broadinstitute.org/partnerships/office-strategic... "Broad Institute, MIT, and Harvard University partners have made CRISPR-Cas9 technology broadly available to the research community. Broad Institute is working with AddGene, a non-profit plasmid repository, to offer Zhang lab CRISPR plasmids and reagents ... in addition we have non-exclusively licensed many industry partners for development of research tools and reagents and will continue to do so." The reagent/CRISPR toolkit link here (can anyone just sign up and order the reagents?): https://www.addgene.org/CRISPR/ https://www.addgene.org/CRISPR/ I'm curious, for peeps in industry who have licensed the original CRISPR/Cas9 patent from the Broad, what is the fee structure that the Broad is charging(?) Or alternatively do people choose to license patents from the companies established by the three major PI's who claim discovery for different parts of CRISPR (Zhang, Doudna et al?) Lastly, I'm curious why two 501(c) academic institutions are even fighting for this patent. Both UC Berkeley molecular biology dept. and Broad Institute are funded significantly via federal research grants that are awarded to individual labs within the organizations. If it seems like the status quo is that CRISPR is free to license for the academic community, does it matter which place owns the patent?

carbocation 11y ago
> Lastly, I'm curious why two 501(c) academic institutions are even fighting for this patent. Their choice to freely license it to the academic community only increases the likelihood that, depending on licensing fees, the technology will generate huge revenue from industry.
- karmelapple 11y ago
  That revenue will go back to the university for (hopefully) additional research, rather than to stockholders of a for-profit company.
makomk 11y ago
I think recipients of federal grants are expected to patent anything that comes out of their research; some of the grants may even require it. (It's definitely the case with some EU-funded ones. Which was why, for example, the creator of golden rice was forced to patent it and sell the patent to a private company even though he didn't want to - it was a condition of the EU research grant that funded development of it.)

carbocation 11y ago

> Lastly, I'm curious why two 501(c) academic institutions are even fighting for this patent. Their choice to freely license it to the academic community only increases the likelihood that, depending on licensing fees, the technology will generate huge revenue from industry.

karmelapple 11y ago
That revenue will go back to the university for (hopefully) additional research, rather than to stockholders of a for-profit company.

makomk 11y ago

I think recipients of federal grants are expected to patent anything that comes out of their research; some of the grants may even require it. (It's definitely the case with some EU-funded ones. Which was why, for example, the creator of golden rice was forced to patent it and sell the patent to a private company even though he didn't want to - it was a condition of the EU research grant that funded development of it.)