02 Mar Harvard beats Berkeley! University of California paid dearly for delays in the patenting of “biotech discovery of the century”
Although the team from Berkeley was the first to develop CRISPR technology, revolutionary gene modification methodology, scientists at the Broad Institute of Harvard University had gotten rights to the patent worth millions of dollars. University of California paid dearly for delays in the patenting.
Jennifer Doudna at the University of California in Berkeley and her colleague Emmanuelle Charpentier are pioneers of CRISPR technology of genetic engineering. Taking a bacterial cell which uses the cellular system CRISPR/Cas in defense against viral infections, they developed a revolutionary CRISPR technology which can cut DNA like scissors at a specific sites and thus allows scientists a precise and simple gene-editing method.
They patented the use of CRISPR technology for gene modification in May 2012, and in the following year published a scientific journal reporting its application on the genes of eukaryotic cells. Only a month before the publication of the group from Berkeley, scientists from Harvard came to the same findings, but also went a step further. They launched an accelerated application procedure for the protection of CRISPR/Cas gene modification techniques in eukaryotic cells, and thus became the first who has right to use CRISPR in the wider commercial purposes, such as treating a large number of genetic and immune diseases in humans.