Appellate Brief Seeking Reversal of U.S. Patent Board Decision on CRISPR/Cas9 Gene Editing
Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
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- Appeal seeks reversal of Patent Trial and Appeal Board decision terminating interference without determining priority of inventorship of CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing
- Brief asserts that the Board failed to properly apply controlling U.S. Supreme Court and Federal Circuit precedents, and ignored evidence of multiple groups readily applying CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing to eukaryotic cells following teachings of Charpentier-Doudna team
As explained in UC’s brief, application of the correct legal standards to the case is believed to require reversal of the PTAB’s decision. For these reasons, UC requests that the Federal Circuit instruct the PTAB to reinstate the interference proceeding so that it can properly determine priority of inventorship, as previously requested by UC. The PTAB’s failures to consider pertinent evidence and apply appropriate legal standards should at the very least require the matter to be remanded so that the PTAB can properly consider the evidence related to obviousness and Broad’s no-interference-in-fact motion using appropriate legal standards.
In the PTAB’s February decision terminating the interference proceeding prematurely, it had not yet considered the teachings of UC’s own prior-filed patent application with respect to using CRISPR/Cas9 in eukaryotic cells. Instead, the PTAB only addressed the threshold question of whether use in eukaryotic cells can be separately patentable from use in all settings as covered by UC’s claims. However, determinations on the underlying substantive matters have recently been made in parallel prosecution before the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (“USPTO”). The USPTO has rejected a series of patent applications filed by Broad that are directed to uses of CRISPR/Cas9 technology in eukaryotic cells as being non-novel in view of UC’s prior-filed patent application, which the USPTO examiners considered to have effectively taught use of the CRISPR/Cas9 technology in eukaryotic cells. In addition, patent applications filed by Sigma-Aldrich and Toolgen that similarly claim use of CRISPR/Cas9 in eukaryotic cells (both of which filed applications before Broad’s application) have likewise recently been rejected as being either non-novel or obvious in view of the prior-filed UC patent application with specific respect to its teachings regarding application of the invention to use in eukaryotic cells.
SOURCES
On 7/25/2017
CRISPR Therapeutics, Intellia Therapeutics, Caribou Biosciences and ERS Genomics Announce Appellate Brief Seeking Reversal of U.S. Patent Board Decision on CRISPR/Cas9 Gene Editing
On 4/13/2017:
Gene Editing Consortium of Biotech Companies: CRISPR Therapeutics $CRSP, Intellia Therapeutics $NTLA, Caribou Biosciences, ERS Genomics, UC, Berkeley (Doudna’s IP) and University of Vienna (Charpentier’s IP), is appealing the decisionruled that there was no interference between the two sides, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, targeting patents from The Broad Institute.
Curator: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
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