NEXT GENERATION GENOME EDITING TECHNOLOGIES Next-Generation-Genome-Editing-Technologies | Page 10

LITIGATIONS SURROUNDING CAS9:
The ease with which CAS9 has shown its productivity, it is not hard to visualize it as highly
utilized technology in academic and commercial laboratories across the world. In the landscape
of CRISPR patent, there are two major role players, who could secure rights to CRISPR system. The
first group is led by Jennifer Douda, a professor of chemistry and Molecular and cellular biology at
University of California, Berkeley, USA. In collaboration with Dr. Emmanuelle Charpentier’s group,
Jennifer Doudna in 2012 published the first characterization of function CAS9 within the CRISPR
system that reflected its ability to induce site specific double stranded breaks in target DNA.
The second major party is that of Dr. Feng Zhang’s group from Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT
USA. He published a paper reporting guide sequences that could simultaneously cut genome in
eukaryotic cells, making CRISPR widely applicable. Zhang was awarded the first patent on the
basic CRISPR technology - US8697359; CRISPR-Cas systems and methods for altering expression
of gene products’.
Doudna/ Charpentier had filed their patent in March 2013 and Zhang had filed in October
2015, so then why did Zhang’s patent get approved? The answer lays in the difference between
cell types i.e. prokaryotic v/s eukaryotic cells. PTAB has recently decided that both parties can
maintain patents based on this differentiation. But University of California and its co-owners
disagree with the decision as they believe that using CRISPR-CAS9 system for eukaryotic cells
is not different from using it from other cell types. But the major question that develops itself
in whole scenario is that whether a technique like CRISPR which being used worldwide should
be patented, should one organization get all the rights of using it or should it be accessible to
other parties as well?