Nine Parties had come forward: Opposition Procedure to the Broad Institute’s first European CRISPR–Cas9 Patent

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Nine Parties had come forward: Opposition Procedure to the Broad Institute’s first European CRISPR–Cas9 Patent

March 17, 2016 by 2012pharmaceutical

Nine Parties had come forward: Opposition Procedure to the Broad Institute’s first European CRISPR–Cas9 Patent

Curator: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

UPDATED on 4/3/2018

January 24, 2018

The CRISPR Chronicles — Broad Institute Wins One and Loses One

By Kevin E. Noonan —

The interference between the Broad Institute and the University of California/Berkeley has been in the spotlight over the past year (see “PTAB Decides CRISPR Interference — No interference-in-fact“; “PTAB Decides CRISPR Interference in Favor of Broad Institute — Their Reasoning“; “University of California/Berkeley Appeals Adverse CRISPR Decision by PTAB“; and “Berkeley Files Opening Brief in CRISPR Appeal“). But there have been other skirmishes between the parties, each of which has recently been (for now) resolved.

The more significant one is the decision on January 17 by the Opposition Division (OD) of the European Patent Office to revoke in its entirety Proprietors The Broad Institute, MIT, and Harvard College’s European Patent No. EP 2771468, which had been opposed by Novozymes A/S, CRISPR Therapeutics GG, and several strawmen). Representative claims revoked by the OD are as follows:

A non-naturally occurring or engineered composition comprising:
a Clustered Regularly Interspersed Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)-CRISPR associated (Cas) (CRISPR-Cas) system chimeric RNA (chiRNA) polynucleotide sequence, wherein the polynucleotide sequence comprises
(a) a guide sequence of between 10 – 30 nucleotides in length, capable of hybridizing to a target sequence in a eukaryotic cell,
(b) a tracr mate sequence, an
(c) a tracrRNA sequence
wherein (a), (b) and (c) are arranged in a 5′ to 3′ orientation,
wherein when transcribed, the tracr mate sequence hybridizes to the tracrRNA sequence and the guide sequence directs sequence-specific binding of a CRISPR complex to the target sequence,
wherein the CRISPR complex comprises a Type II Cas9 protein complexed with (1) the guide sequence that is hybridized to the target sequence, and (2) the tracr mate sequence that is hybridized to the tracrRNA sequence,
wherein the tracrRNA sequence is 50 or more nucleotides in length.
A Clustered Regularly Interspersed Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)-CRISPR associated (Cas) (CRISPR-Cas) vector system comprising one or more vectors comprising
I. a first regulatory element operably linked to a nucleotide sequence encoding a CRISPR-Cas system chimeric RNA (chiRNA) polynucleotide sequence as defined in claim 1, and
II. a second regulatory element operably linked to a nucleotide sequence encoding a Type II Cas9 protein comprising one or more nuclear localization sequences, of sufficient strength to drive accumulation of said Cas9 protein in a detectable amount in the nucleus of a eukaryotic cell;
wherein components I and II are located on the same or different vectors of the system.

SOURCE

http://www.patentdocs.org/2018/01/the-crispr-chronicles-broad-institute-wins-one-and-loses-one.html

European Patent Office (EPO) – By 11 November 2015, the deadline for objections to the Broad’s first European CRISPR–Cas9 patent, nine parties had come forward — launching an opposition procedure that can take years to resolve.

On 10 March, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) will begin an investigation into who deserves the patent on using CRISPR–Cas9 to edit genes. This ‘patent interference’ could determine who profits from CRISPR in coming years.

Will this be the only CRISPR patent interference?

Not necessarily. In its filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Editas Medicine highlighted a potential interference claim by a Seoul company called ToolGen. Having multiple interferences over the same patent is rare, says Conley, but possible.

How the US CRISPR patent probe will play out

Decision could determine who profits from the gene-editing technique in future.

Heidi Ledford

07 March 2016

SOURCE

http://www.nature.com/news/how-the-us-crispr-patent-probe-will-play-out-1.19519

PDF

http://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/1.19519!/menu/main/topColumns/topLeftColumn/pdf/531149a.pdf

Nature 531, 149 (10 March 2016) doi:10.1038/531149a

CRISPR: Ask us anything

Join us on Reddit where we’ll be talking about all things CRISPR.

16 March 2016

SOURCE

http://www.nature.com/news/crispr-ask-us-anything-1.19584

Who’s who in the patent interference?

One patent claim comes from a team led by molecular biologist Jennifer Doudna at the University of California, Berkeley, and microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier, now at Umeå University in Sweden and the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin. They published a 2012 paper demonstrating that the Cas9 enzyme can be directed to cut specific sites in isolated DNA (M. Jinek et al. Science 337, 816–821; 2012), and initiated their patent application on 25 May 2012.

Another team, led by Feng Zhang at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, published a 2013 paper demonstrating the application of CRISPR–Cas9 in mammalian cells (L. Cong et al. Science 339, 819–823; 2013). Zhang’s team began a patent application on 12 December 2012.

Although the Berkeley team filed first, the Broad team submitted its application to an expedited review programme, and was awarded the patent in April 2014. The Berkeley team then requested a patent interference against the initial Broad patent plus 11 related Broad patents. On 11 January, the USPTO granted Berkeley’s request.