Entrepreneurs are taking genetic-editing technology from the lab to the clinic with grand ambitions. But who owns the patents? by mtindera07
with another Crispr pioneer, 37-year-old Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Crispr is an acronym for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.” It refers to the way bacteria store, in their genomes, snippets of viral DNA, like mug shots. Those markers are used to identify invaders that return, much as a human immune system uses telltale elements of a polio virus remembered from a vaccine.
Haurwitz grew up in Austin, Texas, and earned a bachelor’s degree in biology at Harvard. She didn’t have a clear plan when she went on to UC Berkeley, but she thought she might later become a patent attorney. Haurwitz took a few business classes before getting her Ph.D., then pitched venture capitalists on funding a technology they didn’t really understand. Caribou was securing an exclusive license to some Crispr patents held by the University of California system and the University of Vienna. Still, “pretty much every VC we talked to kind of said, ‘Meh,’ ” Haurwitz remembers. This was 2012, and they thought she was overestimating Crispr’s potential.
Caribou licensed to Integrated DNA Technologies the right to sell biology researchers what they’d need for gene-editing experiments. Genus, an animal genetics firm, paid Caribou an undisclosed amount for the exclusive right to use its proprietary Crispr technology to engineer the genes of pigs and other livestock. Similarly, the Jackson Laboratory is paying Caribou to use Crispr to engineer new populations of research mice that model human diseases.
Beyond the competition, there is an intellectual property conflict. Overlapping patent claims from the University of California and the Broad Institute emerged for the foundational technology, which involves an enzyme called Cas9, used to cut DNA. A lawsuit between the institutions was decided in favor of the Broad, but the U.S. Patent Office has granted patents to both.
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