8 ms·

Why the University of California Is Appealing the CRISPR Patent Decision

133 points by azuajef 9y ago

TuringNYC 9y ago
Someone summed up the decision as such: UC Berkeley patented tennis balls. Harvard/MIT patented yellow tennis balls. Harvard/MIT won. I realize this example is tongue in cheek and imperfect. I also dont pretend to understand the biology, but has anyone produced a good layperson's view of how Harvard/MIT won this? Disclaimer: I'm a graduate student at UC Berkeley.
- untilHellbanned 9y ago
  use of CRISPR in humans is what Harvard/MIT want to protect. According to the judges, UC Berkeley didn't make that clear. Even being a biologist who understands CRISPR well and having trained at Harvard/MIT (disclosure to provide context about biases), it's not clear what Harvard/MIT will gain with winning this fight. Because the incentive is incredibly strong, I feel like everyone will find a way to work around whatever patents Harvard/MIT collect. I see UC Berkeley's side in these patents because their discovery proceeded Harvard/MIT and Harvard/MIT (Eric Lander) is just sucking up airtime like Trump does to come out on top. See this: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1825 http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1825
- 4258HzG 9y ago
  To stretch your analogy: "Tennis balls colored for enhanced human recognition." So they're patenting a method to 'improve' CRISPER, in this case 'adapting' it for use in humans. To technically use the Harvard / MIT patent you may still need the UCB one. Why this happened from my experience patenting through UCB and dealing with Harvard is that UCB does not have the best patent department when it comes to helping inventors draft patents that are defensible in terms of pushing for sufficiently general language, or including defensive dependent claims (like for use humans) for precluding people patenting specific extensions as Harvard/MIT did in this case. (They just put my patent memo in the appropriate legal format with a few minor modifications.) In contrast, Harvard/MIT as organizations are far more serious about intellectual property and have the legal departments to reflect it.
  - CalChris 9y ago
    Berkeley's IP office is awful. By comparison, Larry Page patented Page Rank. He assigned it to Stanford, Stanford prosecuted it and licensed it back to him, basically for nothing. There's a lot of trust there between student and institution. Furthermore, Stanford owns and defends the patent and no one fucks with Stanford. https://www.google.com/patents/US6285999 https://www.google.com/patents/US6285999 I say this as a Berkeley grad. University IP departments should be more like Stanford and less like Berkeley.
    - bsder 9y ago
      > I say this as a Berkeley grad. University IP departments should be more like Stanford and less like Berkeley. I disagree. And I think that anything funded with public grant money should be barred from being patented. If you want to patent it, you should have to fund it privately and take all the risk. If there is even a whiff of public money, you shouldn't get to patent it. Look at how much patents retarded the 3D printing industry, for example. Those advances were very much funded by public money, and those patents basically made 3D printing economically infeasible until they expired. We could have had this revolution 30 years ago--that's a huge loss to us as a society. The foundations of the computer industry rest upon the fact that many things escaped being patented because they came from Berkeley. While most people think of Unix, there was something possibly even more important--the circuit simulator SPICE. The FORTRAN code for Spice2(g6?) became the foundation of the entire VLSI ecosystem that gave us the cheap chips that we all take for granted. It spawned an entire industry. And Berkeley never wanted that to happen again. So they locked down the rewrite into C (Spice3(e2?)) and that code never went anywhere. And even 30 years on, it cost the NGSpice guys an enormous amount of duplicated work.
      - jjoonathan 9y ago
        > I think that anything funded with public grant money should be barred from being patented. Grants, green cards, and IP rights are the three pillars of research funding in the US. Any proposal to lop off one pillar needs to come with a plan to replace it or an argument why decimating the US research apparatus is the lesser evil.
- peterwwillis 9y ago
  https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/04/why-uc-is-appealing-the-crispr-patent-decision/522888/?single_page=true https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/04/why-uc-i... "The UC’s filing covered gene editing with CRISPR, but it did not specifically cover eukaryotic cells—complex cells that include animal, plants, and humans—where all the lucrative applications are likely to be. The Broad’s patents did cover eukaryotic cells, and its lawyers argued that getting CRISPR to work in bacteria or free-floating DNA did not automatically mean it would work in the more complex environment. Hence, there was no inference—the decision that UC is now appealing." https://www.statnews.com/2017/02/15/crispr-patent-ruling/ https://www.statnews.com/2017/02/15/crispr-patent-ruling/ "The patent board said in its decision that the achievement of the Broad’s Feng Zhang in inventing a way to use CRISPR to edit the genomes of mouse and human cells “would not have been obvious” from the invention by Doudna and Charpentier “because one of ordinary skill in the art would not have reasonably expected a CRISPR-Cas9 system to be successful” in those higher-order cells."
- CalChris 9y ago
  The tennis ball summation is perfect. However, you can go further with it. UC Berkeley has the right (or they will when their patents issue) to exclude Harvard/MIT (and anyone else) from manufacturing tennis balls. Harvard/MIT also have the right to exclude UC Berkeley (and anyone else) from manufacturing yellow tennis balls. So UC Berkeley and Harvard/MIT will have to have a sit down and do a deal in order for anyone to get any yellow tennis balls manufactured. It's in their best interests to do this deal but first there will be some legal preliminaries. (NB: we are ignoring Design Patents here.)
- ChuckMcM 9y ago
  I think it would be really interesting if the Supreme Court stepped in an invalidated the patent based on 'natural function' of the Cas9 gene. Not that I expect that to happen just that it would be hilarious if it did.
- notlob 9y ago
  Berkeley applied for a patent on tennis balls, an application still pending. Harvard/MIT later applied for a patent on yellow tennis balls and paid a fee to accelerate the review of their application. The Harvard/MIT patent was issued first. The recent PTAB trial found that the Berkeley patent application did not interfere with the Harvard/MIT patent, but this does not mean that the Berkeley application will not issue, nor does it mean that one could practice yellow tennis balls (CRISPER/Cas9 in eukaryotes) without licensing both from Berkeley and Harvard/MIT. As to how Harvard/MIT won, part of the PTAB decision relied on general statements made by one of the Berkeley inventors as to the challenges in dyeing tennis balls yellow (getting the CRISPER/Cas9 system working in eurkaryotes) and so demonstrating that the Harvard/MIT inventors had to made an inventive step. That is a pretty profound and worrying development with respect to academic freedom.
  - obstinate 9y ago
    Why is it a worrying development with respect to academic freedom? I think I'm getting the sense -- statements you make about how difficult some piece of work is can be used as evidence that the work is difficult, and thus as evidence that someone who does that work has done something inventive. But it doesn't seem like a particularly unusual revelation. Sometimes true things will be to your adversary's advantage. That's always been true.
    - Sacho 9y ago
      I presume parent is worried that this will lead to less open exchange on the academic marketplace - you would not want to have public discussions about anything related to the work you are planning to patent, out of fear you might sabotage it.
      - smallnamespace 9y ago
        That cuts both ways, in that open academic exchange can also be evidence that strengthens your own case. Although I guess the real risk is that lawyers would get end up involved in that process.
    - 9y ago
- PL1 9y ago
  There has been tremendous lobbying, pressure and marketing from the Broad Institute on this issue. For instance, see: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1825 http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1825 I have personally talked to a student at the Broad Institute who told me a number of people there do not agree with the Broad positions (namely the Cell article and Lander's statements). Disclaimer: Also a graduate student at UC Berkeley (not in Bio).
alextheparrot 9y ago
It is a tragedy that all this time and effort is being spent to create a temporally bounded monopoly which, in the long run, will likely hinder the use and development of CRISPR. Why is it not possible for patents to recognize multiple, independent sources of innovation and to award intellectual ownership of the ideas to all deserving parties?
- djsumdog 9y ago
  Australia's patent on Wi-Fi show that patents held by the education sector can be big money for Universities. But in the article they're talking about how these two schools have already spent tens of millions on this. That's money that could have gone to research, scholarships, grants, and reducing the insanely high tuition fees students have to deal with. I hate this model of how Universities, instead of seeking to help each other and help the world benefit from open innovation, instead are willing to pay huge legal fees so that one of the two gets a massive payoff while the other is stuck with a large legal bill.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    There's another good example: H264, and the related audio patents. The Fraunhofer Society has funded years of university research just with the license money from MP4 and similar. Always keep this in mind when choosing between h264 and vp8/vp9.
    - Dylan16807 9y ago
      > Always keep this in mind when choosing between h264 and vp8/vp9. That's worded like you want to guilt me into approving of the actions of the patent pool. I'd rather not. Give me a link and I'll just donate $2 to them while strongly supporting AV1 over H.264/H.265.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - kuschku 9y ago
wodencafe 9y ago
How can they patent this? It's been occurring naturally for millennia.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  General Electric fought to patent life. New Zealand banned software patents. I feel like we're going to see similar analogies between bioengineering and software in the future.
- peterwwillis 9y ago
  They're not patenting the biological process itself, they're patenting how they can hack it.
nthompson 9y ago
I'm confused about how either MIT, Harvard, or UC Berkeley owns the IP. Ostensibly the research was funded by the NIH or NSF, not those institutions. Is it really the case the the universities own the IP of NSF-sponsored grants?
- jessriedel 9y ago
  Patents are awarded to inventors not funders. Grant agreements rarely require the transfer of patent rights, but employment agreements often do.
  - wonderous 9y ago
    If it's a US federal grant from SBIR for example, even when retaining title to the patent, the researcher must grant a nontransferable license to practice the invention to the federal government.
- SeanLuke 9y ago
  Bayh-Dole Act. Since 1980, IP produced by government sponsored research is owned by the inventor, not the government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act
  - CalChris 9y ago
    That's for Federally funded research. The definitive way to find out who owns the patent is to look at the Original Assignee and then the Legal Events to find out who the most recent owner is: So Transmeta was the Original Assignee for US7100061 but Intellectual Ventures now owns it. https://www.google.com/patents/US7100061 https://www.google.com/patents/US7100061
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
jwilliams 9y ago
For those of you coming late to CRISPR and this debate - it's covered in a Radiolab podcast episode from February http://www.radiolab.org/story/update-crispr/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/update-crispr/ This is an update, but opens with the original CRISPR report from some years back -- featuring Jennifer Doudna from UC Berkeley.
davesque 9y ago
Call me crazy, but I somehow doubt all of this fighting over profits/bragging rights/what-have-you will speed the rate at which CRISPR can be developed into a technology that actually saves lives.
kpil 9y ago
That's it. I will patent the process of picking up rocks in order to throw them at things. I think it's a great achievement to discover the CRISPER/Cas9 system, but just as a rock - it was just laying there. It's absurd that genes can be patented, and the ethics is mindbogglingly disturbing - I could understand procedures and methods for using or analysing genes, but the actual code as found in nature?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
CRISPR 9y ago
After having spent several weeks studying the case law and patent procedures, I have come to the conclusion that Doudna/UC were naive and sloppy in their original approach to the CRISPR IP and public positioning. Morality aside, I believe Broad has the stronger U.S. claim, at least legally speaking. It's typically not the court's position to rectify the mis-steps of others. The processes are what they are, and the law is what it is, and the onus is on the claimant to properly protect themselves.
CRISPR 9y ago
Required reading if you want to really dig on this - https://acts.uspto.gov/ifiling/PublicView.jsp?identifier=106048&identifier2=null&tabSel=4&action=filecontent&replyTo=PublicView.jsp# https://acts.uspto.gov/ifiling/PublicView.jsp?identifier=106...
- CRISPR 9y ago
  Also - see here https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/04-1350.ZS.html https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/04-1350.ZS.html and here https://www.pillsburylaw.com/images/content/6/5/v2/65484/When-Is-An-Invention-That-Was-Obvious-To-Try-Nevertheless-Nonobv.pdf https://www.pillsburylaw.com/images/content/6/5/v2/65484/Whe... Would definitely read the Transcript and Decision on Motions thoroughly from the prior posted link. The weight given to contemporaneous statements regarding "likelihood of success" is paramount. Bottom line - UC muffed the punt, imho, and their counsel didn't make things any better by taking the tack they did. Broad/Zhang drew a straight bead on the commercial IP from the get go and outmaneuvered Doudna/UC from what I can tell. Appellate court could certainly disagree, however, I believe they have a tough hill to climb in light of the record. From a scientific discovery perspective, it seems Doudna/Charpentier are likely to garner the lion's share of credit and accolades, but from a commercial perspective, I do believe Broad will come out on top. Doudna/UC is in a tough spot to claim that it was confident that CRISPR would work in eurkaryotic environments, and Broad had the jump with a better lab setup (and Doudna being crystallography focused). I also believe there is a bit of high level geo-politics at play here considering the Max Plank Institute and (Berlin) Univ. Vienna's involvement with the UC claim.

133 points by azuajef 9y ago

Someone summed up the decision as such: UC Berkeley patented tennis balls. Harvard/MIT patented yellow tennis balls. Harvard/MIT won. I realize this example is tongue in cheek and imperfect. I also dont pretend to understand the biology, but has anyone produced a good layperson's view of how Harvard/MIT won this? Disclaimer: I'm a graduate student at UC Berkeley.

untilHellbanned 9y ago
use of CRISPR in humans is what Harvard/MIT want to protect. According to the judges, UC Berkeley didn't make that clear. Even being a biologist who understands CRISPR well and having trained at Harvard/MIT (disclosure to provide context about biases), it's not clear what Harvard/MIT will gain with winning this fight. Because the incentive is incredibly strong, I feel like everyone will find a way to work around whatever patents Harvard/MIT collect. I see UC Berkeley's side in these patents because their discovery proceeded Harvard/MIT and Harvard/MIT (Eric Lander) is just sucking up airtime like Trump does to come out on top. See this: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1825 http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1825
4258HzG 9y ago
To stretch your analogy: "Tennis balls colored for enhanced human recognition." So they're patenting a method to 'improve' CRISPER, in this case 'adapting' it for use in humans. To technically use the Harvard / MIT patent you may still need the UCB one. Why this happened from my experience patenting through UCB and dealing with Harvard is that UCB does not have the best patent department when it comes to helping inventors draft patents that are defensible in terms of pushing for sufficiently general language, or including defensive dependent claims (like for use humans) for precluding people patenting specific extensions as Harvard/MIT did in this case. (They just put my patent memo in the appropriate legal format with a few minor modifications.) In contrast, Harvard/MIT as organizations are far more serious about intellectual property and have the legal departments to reflect it.
- CalChris 9y ago
  Berkeley's IP office is awful. By comparison, Larry Page patented Page Rank. He assigned it to Stanford, Stanford prosecuted it and licensed it back to him, basically for nothing. There's a lot of trust there between student and institution. Furthermore, Stanford owns and defends the patent and no one fucks with Stanford. https://www.google.com/patents/US6285999 https://www.google.com/patents/US6285999 I say this as a Berkeley grad. University IP departments should be more like Stanford and less like Berkeley.
  - bsder 9y ago
    > I say this as a Berkeley grad. University IP departments should be more like Stanford and less like Berkeley. I disagree. And I think that anything funded with public grant money should be barred from being patented. If you want to patent it, you should have to fund it privately and take all the risk. If there is even a whiff of public money, you shouldn't get to patent it. Look at how much patents retarded the 3D printing industry, for example. Those advances were very much funded by public money, and those patents basically made 3D printing economically infeasible until they expired. We could have had this revolution 30 years ago--that's a huge loss to us as a society. The foundations of the computer industry rest upon the fact that many things escaped being patented because they came from Berkeley. While most people think of Unix, there was something possibly even more important--the circuit simulator SPICE. The FORTRAN code for Spice2(g6?) became the foundation of the entire VLSI ecosystem that gave us the cheap chips that we all take for granted. It spawned an entire industry. And Berkeley never wanted that to happen again. So they locked down the rewrite into C (Spice3(e2?)) and that code never went anywhere. And even 30 years on, it cost the NGSpice guys an enormous amount of duplicated work.
    - jjoonathan 9y ago
      > I think that anything funded with public grant money should be barred from being patented. Grants, green cards, and IP rights are the three pillars of research funding in the US. Any proposal to lop off one pillar needs to come with a plan to replace it or an argument why decimating the US research apparatus is the lesser evil.
peterwwillis 9y ago
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/04/why-uc-is-appealing-the-crispr-patent-decision/522888/?single_page=true https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/04/why-uc-i... "The UC’s filing covered gene editing with CRISPR, but it did not specifically cover eukaryotic cells—complex cells that include animal, plants, and humans—where all the lucrative applications are likely to be. The Broad’s patents did cover eukaryotic cells, and its lawyers argued that getting CRISPR to work in bacteria or free-floating DNA did not automatically mean it would work in the more complex environment. Hence, there was no inference—the decision that UC is now appealing." https://www.statnews.com/2017/02/15/crispr-patent-ruling/ https://www.statnews.com/2017/02/15/crispr-patent-ruling/ "The patent board said in its decision that the achievement of the Broad’s Feng Zhang in inventing a way to use CRISPR to edit the genomes of mouse and human cells “would not have been obvious” from the invention by Doudna and Charpentier “because one of ordinary skill in the art would not have reasonably expected a CRISPR-Cas9 system to be successful” in those higher-order cells."
CalChris 9y ago
The tennis ball summation is perfect. However, you can go further with it. UC Berkeley has the right (or they will when their patents issue) to exclude Harvard/MIT (and anyone else) from manufacturing tennis balls. Harvard/MIT also have the right to exclude UC Berkeley (and anyone else) from manufacturing yellow tennis balls. So UC Berkeley and Harvard/MIT will have to have a sit down and do a deal in order for anyone to get any yellow tennis balls manufactured. It's in their best interests to do this deal but first there will be some legal preliminaries. (NB: we are ignoring Design Patents here.)
ChuckMcM 9y ago
I think it would be really interesting if the Supreme Court stepped in an invalidated the patent based on 'natural function' of the Cas9 gene. Not that I expect that to happen just that it would be hilarious if it did.
notlob 9y ago
Berkeley applied for a patent on tennis balls, an application still pending. Harvard/MIT later applied for a patent on yellow tennis balls and paid a fee to accelerate the review of their application. The Harvard/MIT patent was issued first. The recent PTAB trial found that the Berkeley patent application did not interfere with the Harvard/MIT patent, but this does not mean that the Berkeley application will not issue, nor does it mean that one could practice yellow tennis balls (CRISPER/Cas9 in eukaryotes) without licensing both from Berkeley and Harvard/MIT. As to how Harvard/MIT won, part of the PTAB decision relied on general statements made by one of the Berkeley inventors as to the challenges in dyeing tennis balls yellow (getting the CRISPER/Cas9 system working in eurkaryotes) and so demonstrating that the Harvard/MIT inventors had to made an inventive step. That is a pretty profound and worrying development with respect to academic freedom.
- obstinate 9y ago
  Why is it a worrying development with respect to academic freedom? I think I'm getting the sense -- statements you make about how difficult some piece of work is can be used as evidence that the work is difficult, and thus as evidence that someone who does that work has done something inventive. But it doesn't seem like a particularly unusual revelation. Sometimes true things will be to your adversary's advantage. That's always been true.
  - Sacho 9y ago
    I presume parent is worried that this will lead to less open exchange on the academic marketplace - you would not want to have public discussions about anything related to the work you are planning to patent, out of fear you might sabotage it.
    - smallnamespace 9y ago
      That cuts both ways, in that open academic exchange can also be evidence that strengthens your own case. Although I guess the real risk is that lawyers would get end up involved in that process.
  - 9y ago
PL1 9y ago
There has been tremendous lobbying, pressure and marketing from the Broad Institute on this issue. For instance, see: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1825 http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1825 I have personally talked to a student at the Broad Institute who told me a number of people there do not agree with the Broad positions (namely the Cell article and Lander's statements). Disclaimer: Also a graduate student at UC Berkeley (not in Bio).

alextheparrot 9y ago

It is a tragedy that all this time and effort is being spent to create a temporally bounded monopoly which, in the long run, will likely hinder the use and development of CRISPR. Why is it not possible for patents to recognize multiple, independent sources of innovation and to award intellectual ownership of the ideas to all deserving parties?

djsumdog 9y ago
Australia's patent on Wi-Fi show that patents held by the education sector can be big money for Universities. But in the article they're talking about how these two schools have already spent tens of millions on this. That's money that could have gone to research, scholarships, grants, and reducing the insanely high tuition fees students have to deal with. I hate this model of how Universities, instead of seeking to help each other and help the world benefit from open innovation, instead are willing to pay huge legal fees so that one of the two gets a massive payoff while the other is stuck with a large legal bill.
- kuschku 9y ago
  There's another good example: H264, and the related audio patents. The Fraunhofer Society has funded years of university research just with the license money from MP4 and similar. Always keep this in mind when choosing between h264 and vp8/vp9.
  - Dylan16807 9y ago
    > Always keep this in mind when choosing between h264 and vp8/vp9. That's worded like you want to guilt me into approving of the actions of the patent pool. I'd rather not. Give me a link and I'll just donate $2 to them while strongly supporting AV1 over H.264/H.265.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - kuschku 9y ago

wodencafe 9y ago

How can they patent this? It's been occurring naturally for millennia.

djsumdog 9y ago
General Electric fought to patent life. New Zealand banned software patents. I feel like we're going to see similar analogies between bioengineering and software in the future.
peterwwillis 9y ago
They're not patenting the biological process itself, they're patenting how they can hack it.

nthompson 9y ago

I'm confused about how either MIT, Harvard, or UC Berkeley owns the IP. Ostensibly the research was funded by the NIH or NSF, not those institutions. Is it really the case the the universities own the IP of NSF-sponsored grants?

jessriedel 9y ago
Patents are awarded to inventors not funders. Grant agreements rarely require the transfer of patent rights, but employment agreements often do.
- wonderous 9y ago
  If it's a US federal grant from SBIR for example, even when retaining title to the patent, the researcher must grant a nontransferable license to practice the invention to the federal government.
SeanLuke 9y ago
Bayh-Dole Act. Since 1980, IP produced by government sponsored research is owned by the inventor, not the government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act
- CalChris 9y ago
  That's for Federally funded research. The definitive way to find out who owns the patent is to look at the Original Assignee and then the Legal Events to find out who the most recent owner is: So Transmeta was the Original Assignee for US7100061 but Intellectual Ventures now owns it. https://www.google.com/patents/US7100061 https://www.google.com/patents/US7100061
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

jwilliams 9y ago

For those of you coming late to CRISPR and this debate - it's covered in a Radiolab podcast episode from February http://www.radiolab.org/story/update-crispr/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/update-crispr/ This is an update, but opens with the original CRISPR report from some years back -- featuring Jennifer Doudna from UC Berkeley.

davesque 9y ago

Call me crazy, but I somehow doubt all of this fighting over profits/bragging rights/what-have-you will speed the rate at which CRISPR can be developed into a technology that actually saves lives.

kpil 9y ago

That's it. I will patent the process of picking up rocks in order to throw them at things. I think it's a great achievement to discover the CRISPER/Cas9 system, but just as a rock - it was just laying there. It's absurd that genes can be patented, and the ethics is mindbogglingly disturbing - I could understand procedures and methods for using or analysing genes, but the actual code as found in nature?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

CRISPR 9y ago

After having spent several weeks studying the case law and patent procedures, I have come to the conclusion that Doudna/UC were naive and sloppy in their original approach to the CRISPR IP and public positioning. Morality aside, I believe Broad has the stronger U.S. claim, at least legally speaking. It's typically not the court's position to rectify the mis-steps of others. The processes are what they are, and the law is what it is, and the onus is on the claimant to properly protect themselves.

CRISPR 9y ago

Required reading if you want to really dig on this - https://acts.uspto.gov/ifiling/PublicView.jsp?identifier=106048&identifier2=null&tabSel=4&action=filecontent&replyTo=PublicView.jsp# https://acts.uspto.gov/ifiling/PublicView.jsp?identifier=106...

CRISPR 9y ago
Also - see here https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/04-1350.ZS.html https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/04-1350.ZS.html and here https://www.pillsburylaw.com/images/content/6/5/v2/65484/When-Is-An-Invention-That-Was-Obvious-To-Try-Nevertheless-Nonobv.pdf https://www.pillsburylaw.com/images/content/6/5/v2/65484/Whe... Would definitely read the Transcript and Decision on Motions thoroughly from the prior posted link. The weight given to contemporaneous statements regarding "likelihood of success" is paramount. Bottom line - UC muffed the punt, imho, and their counsel didn't make things any better by taking the tack they did. Broad/Zhang drew a straight bead on the commercial IP from the get go and outmaneuvered Doudna/UC from what I can tell. Appellate court could certainly disagree, however, I believe they have a tough hill to climb in light of the record. From a scientific discovery perspective, it seems Doudna/Charpentier are likely to garner the lion's share of credit and accolades, but from a commercial perspective, I do believe Broad will come out on top. Doudna/UC is in a tough spot to claim that it was confident that CRISPR would work in eurkaryotic environments, and Broad had the jump with a better lab setup (and Doudna being crystallography focused). I also believe there is a bit of high level geo-politics at play here considering the Max Plank Institute and (Berlin) Univ. Vienna's involvement with the UC claim.