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UC Berkeley's Doudna should be livid. She worked on this technology for years, developing it from it's infancy to in vitro proof. MIT scientists swooped in and
by kneel 10y ago
UC Berkeley's Doudna should be livid.
She worked on this technology for years, developing it from it's infancy to in vitro proof. MIT scientists swooped in and within 2 months applied it in-vivo and patented it.
I guess to be rewarded in science you have to be a master in your field and intensely concerned with IP deadlines.
It's really a shame that Berkeley loses licensing on a tech that was 95% developed at Berkeley.
- whitenoice 10y agoInterested to know what other licenses Berkeley lost, can you state few notable ones?
- onewaystreet 10y ago> I guess to be rewarded in science you have to be a master in your field and intensely concerned with IP deadlines. Dr. Zhang and MIT proved that the Crispr technique would work in plant, animal and human cells. The value of the patents is in that research, not Doudna's in vitro proof.
- kneel 10y agoDoudna took Cripsr from an odd genomic pattern to proof of Cripr/Cas9 being a bacterial immunity complex complete with proof of mechanism. Transferring that body of work over to in-vivo is trivial in comparison to what she did. Transferring genes from one organism to another is run of the mill molecular biology.
- onewaystreet 10y ago> Transferring that body of work over to in-vivo is trivial in comparison to what she did. If this was the case then she would have won the patent fight. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board thought otherwise. Did you read their 51-page decision?
- johncolanduoni 10y agoJust world fallacy much? Did you read the decision?
- libeclipse 10y agoWhat are your credentials?
- kneel 10y agoI work in the field. Very familiar with Crispr/Cas9
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 10y agoTransferring that body of work over to in-vivo is trivial in comparison to what she did. Transferring genes from one organism to another is run of the mill molecular biology. Nobody, including Doudna, would agree with this.
- kneel 10y agoAbsolutely false. This tech has been around for years. Monsanto wouldn't exist without molecular biology. We'd still be extracting insulin out of farm animals if molecular biology hadn't allowed scientists to grow it in yeast.
- estsauver 10y agoYou're mistaking traditional cell bio libraries with CRISPR, crispr takes a two year process and makes it two weeks. It's really quite a significant change. The tech is really not the same, it's the difference between hand braided core-ram and re programmable memory. It's a huge difference.
- shirakawasuna 10y agoThe process of putting the CRISPR genes in a cell and making them target a given gene is trivially simple and undergraduates around the world are doing it every hour (if not more). The Broad group did a little more than that, but it's nothing compared to UC's group's pioneering effort, and amounts mostly to breaking a certain part of the functionality and doing some very standard tests. The tool is extremely effective, as you say, and was primarily "designed" via natural selection. The researchers (1) discovered it, teased out its mechanism of action, and its programmability, and (2) did standard molecular bio techniques to show that it works across several oragnisms. This ruling is based on the fact that the original inventors didn't throw the genes into cells, publish, and (most importantly) apply for patents before the Broad group did. Whether it would work in those other cells was a crapshoot and doesn't represent any significant creative work, and a minor work of science. The importance is the result - we know it works in those cells. Source: I also work in this field. This ruling is absurd.
- acomjean 10y agoI'm one of those who wonder if these things should be patented. That being said: "Swoop in and patented it" is not exactly how it goes. There is a long back story to this with a lot of people discoing stuff to make this possible.[1] CRISPR-CAS9 will probably be supplanted by something else. They're already working on it (hopefully with fewer off target effects). http://www.nature.com/news/alternative-crispr-system-could-improve-genome-editing-1.18432 http://www.nature.com/news/alternative-crispr-system-could-i... You can watch a video by Zheng (the patent holder) on how CRISPR works if you are curious[2] I doubt she's livid, they won a lot of research prize money from their research [2] and she's probably collect money from patents from the company she started with the patent holder "Editas Medicine. Co-founded by the Broad’s Zhang (and also by Doudna, in more collegial days)"[2] as with most patent disputes the lawyers are the real winners: "The Broad’s legal costs, paid by Editas, topped $15 million last summer. UC’s, paid by Caribou, have passed $5 million. Neither party has said what they have spent since then."[2] [1]http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(15)01705-5 http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(15)01705-5 [2]https://www.statnews.com/2017/02/15/crispr-patent-ruling/ https://www.statnews.com/2017/02/15/crispr-patent-ruling/
- kneel 10y agoI would definitely take that cell review with a grain of salt seeing as it was written by MIT/Broad institute.
- acomjean 10y agoWhy? It has a lot of interesting history of the discovery of CRISPR which is really interesting..
- tedsanders 10y agoThe article, written by Eric Lander of the Broad Institute, was widely criticized[1][2][...] at its publication for being a veiled attempt to reframe history to support the Broad Institute's patent claims. Note a number of their framing decisions - choosing to group Doudna et. al.'s contributions as #4 in a long list and setting Zheng's contribution by itself in a different color. Seems innocuous when skimming over it, but the choice of what to emphasize and categorize is not objectively deterministic, and this particular framing and coloring was no doubt chosen deliberately. Many think there was purposeful deception behind that deliberate choice. [1] http://genotopia.scienceblog.com/573/a-whig-history-of-crispr/ http://genotopia.scienceblog.com/573/a-whig-history-of-crisp... [2] http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1825 http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1825
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 10y agoShe worked on this technology for years, developing it from it's infancy to in vitro proof. MIT scientists swooped in and within 2 months applied it in-vivo and patented it. This is wrong. It's really a shame that Berkeley loses licensing on a tech that was 95% developed at Berkeley. This is very wrong.
- CalChris 10y agoIn my opinion, an opinion, the Berkeley IP office is a pain and thus its own enemy. They could take a lesson from Stanford and be more of a partner and advocate for faculty and students. They lost Howe (EE105) to Stanford over simply being a pain rather than a resource.
- dekhn 10y agoDamn straight- Berkeley's IP office is absolutely impossible to deal with. They value their property infinitely high.
- CalChris 10y agoThey also value their prerogatives infinitely high which makes them a pain internally. Outside of the BSD case, I'm struggling to think of anything they've done right.
- amelius 10y agoI'm strongly against patents in science. Science = standing on the shoulders of others. It is not fair if the one (momentarily) standing on top receives all the benefits.
- eumoria 10y agoparticularly when a lot of the research was achieved by charity funding and tax grants. public funded then privately profited is a disgusting outcome of our current research system.
- refurb 10y agoI would disagree. Securing a patent means that further investment is possible. Yes, one of the two labs discovered CRISPR. OK, now what? It's not a treatment at this point, it's just a technique. So someone has to invest a ton of money to turn the technique into a therapy for humans. And I would bet that investment will absolutely dwarf what's been spent so far.
- amelius 10y agoThis means that only one line of further development will be possible, since a patent is basically a license for a monopoly. Instead, we could grant subsidies and have multiple developments working in parallel.
- refurb 10y agoDepending on what the other uses are, the patent holder is always able to out-license the patent for specific uses. This is actually pretty common in biotech.
- tmptmp 10y agoI am no fan of patents, especially most software patents. I hate them. But in other hard sciences the story seems to be slightly different. In theory the "subsidy to multiple parallel projects" approach seems great but it isn't so in practice. How much subsidy could be given and to how many parallel projects for a given technique? There are risks involved. We don't have infinite resources to throw at multiple parallel projects working on different problems using multiple different techniques.