A major ruling was issued on March 1 on the CRISPR patent battle that has been ongoing for the past 7 years, and Professor Jacob Sherkow was quoted in multiple news outlets on the decision. An excerpt from his conversation with Science Magazine is below.
According to a ruling by an appeal board of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), a different group from the one that won the Nobel Prize for creating the genome editor, led by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, made the “actual reduction to practice” of CRISPR’s ability to edit eukaryotic cells, including humans. This means companies developing CRISPR-based medicines must now negotiate with Broad and its partners, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for the use of the editor.
“There is a disconnect in between what patent law considers first to get there and what I think an average scientist considers first to get there,” said Sherkow.
Read the full article at science.org.
More at:
time.com
bloomberg.com