Last week the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a previous decision of the US Patent Trial and Appeal Board that the Broad Institute was entitled to patents it had obtained over CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology. The patents had been the subject of several years of litigation between the University of California Berkeley and the Broad Institute, which is associated with MIT and Harvard University.
The University of California Berkeley had applied for patents relating to CRISPR-Cas9 technology as applied in prokaryotes prior to the filing of the Broad Institute patent applications, but the court affirmed that the Broad Institute patents, which involved use of the technology in eukaryotic cells, were not anticipated or made obvious by the earlier application. The result of this decision is that the University of California Berkeley cannot rely on the earlier priority date of its application to show that the Broad Institute is not entitled to its patents for CRISPR-Cas9 technologies