Court reignites CRISPR patent dispute

The University of California and the University of Vienna have convinced a US appeals court to revive their bid for patent rights to the CRISPR–Cas9 gene-editing technology created by their scientists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier. The case was sent back to the Patent Office’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board for reconsideration after the court found fault with a previous patent tribunal’s ruling giving key CRISPR–Cas9 patent rights to the Broad Institute and researcher Feng Zhang. This will give Nobel prize winners Doudna and Charpentier and their respective universities another chance to claim rights to CRISPR–Cas9 patents as true inventors in the United States.