Professor Jacob Sherkow was quoted in an article in Science on the battle for the patent of the genome editor CRISPR. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a consequential ruling earlier this month.

According to the article, the ruling gives a University of California group, which the court refers to as CVC because it includes the University of Vienna and scientist Emmanuelle Charpentier, a leg up on the invention of one critical component of the CRISPR tool kit.

“This is a major decision by the PTAB,” says Sherkow, a patent attorney at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who has followed the case closely but is not involved. “There’s some language in the opinion from today that’s going to cast a long shadow over the ability of the [CVC] patents going forward.”

Read more at sciencemag.org.