5 ms·
The billion-dollar CRISPR patent battle: A case of big money shaping science
- jostmey 11y agoI hope that scientist find an alternative system to CRISPR, perhaps by continuing the research that lead to the discovery of CRISPR --- how bacteria fight off phages. It would reduce the value of the patents on CRISPR.
- rayiner 11y agoYes, because god forbid a biologist get rich contributing to humanity.
- bberrry 11y agoYes, everyone is concerned about the patent because we want the biologist to be poor.
- blackguardx 11y agoThat very much depends on their institution.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- skosuri 11y agoWell the Zhang lab did find another CRISPR based system that sidesteps the Cas9-based patents [1]. [1] http://www.cell.com/abstract/S0092-8674(15)01200-3 http://www.cell.com/abstract/S0092-8674(15)01200-3
- mazsa 11y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10279476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10279476 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10284508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10284508
- sanxiyn 11y agoThis is already done, and currently disputed patent is not as important as the article claims. Quoting from http://www.ipscell.com/2016/01/patent-expert-weighs-in-on-crispr-dispute-between-uc-broad/ http://www.ipscell.com/2016/01/patent-expert-weighs-in-on-cr... Q. Are there elements to this patent situation that most people are overlooking? A. Probably the most important thing that people are overlooking is the scope of the claimed subject material of the Doudna patent application (and also the Zhang patents in question); only Cas9 is claimed. The claims do not cover other nucleases that could work with CRISPR (such as Zhang’s recently published Cpf1, which is "smaller and easier to program than Cas9") and thus would not exclude someone from using other nucleases.
- toufka 11y agoThere are at least two other proteins that work similar to CRISPR as a homing system to find particular DNA sequences in the body (Talens & Zinc Fingers). The big difference is that they're much slower and trickier on the R&D side - with CRISPR being slightly more complicated, but much faster to apply to your System of Interest. This is precisely why there is such a land-rush with CRISPR right now - it's easy to port to whatever system you're already working with. In fact, I'd likely predict that at the end of the day the CRISPR system is used to find the interesting therapies, but it will likely need to be 'hardened' into one of the above, older technologies to actually become a good deliverable therapeutic. CRISPR is inherently a 2-part system, where one of those parts would be really tricky to get the body to use reliably without error or screwing things up, whereas the older techs could effectively be delivered as a single genetic insert. It's just much harder to scan the search space with those older techs.
- NN88 11y agoHow long before the Nobel gets awarded?