US Appeals Court Revives CRISPR Patent Dispute

Reuters Legal (5/12, Brittain) reports the University of California and the University of Vienna on Monday convinced the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit “to revive their bid for patent rights to groundbreaking CRISPR gene-editing technology created by their Nobel Prize-winning scientists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier.” The decision marks a victory for the schools “in a long-running dispute over CRISPR patent rights with the Broad Institute, a joint venture of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.” The Federal Circuit on Monday said that the US Patent Office “had misapplied federal law on patent conception and sent the case back to the Patent Office’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board for reconsideration.”