Crispr Nobel laureates get another chance to claim ownership in long-running patent dispute

There is a new twist in the long-running dispute over who owns patent rights to the Nobel prize-winning Crispr–Cas9 gene editing technology.

A team including Nobel laureates Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier lost its claim to key Crispr–Cas9 patents in February 2022, when a US Patent and Trademark Office Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) ruled in favour of Feng Zhang and the Broad Institute – a US-based collaboration between Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But now, Doudna and Charpentier have an opportunity to recoup the patent following a successful appeal of the PTAB’s ruling.

A 12 May opinion by a three-judge panel of the US Federal Circuit appeals court found that the PTAB had applied the wrong legal standard in reaching its 2022 decision regarding who first conceived the technology. The court has now ordered the PTAB to reconsider its ruling.