Harvard, MIT, Berkeley are still fighting over genome-editing patents. Now another ruling The US Patent Office's appeal board on Monday sided with Harvard University and MIT by upholding a set of the group's patents covering CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing in plants and animals. CRISPR refers to a set of DNA sequences – Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats – and the protein Cas9 is an enzyme that …
It sounds to me like the Broad patents build on what UC Berkeley et. al. published earlier, and really is a seperately patentable item. They might owe UC Berkeley et. al. royalties on their work as incorporated by Broad's patents, but isn't that how the patent system is supposed to work - by licensing and building on prior art to create new things?
The trouble is that the USPTO seems to recognise the Broad patent and its team of 'inventors' as the "as the inventor of the technology" when as you say it would seem they built upon what UC et al had previously published.
Also, from the article, it would seem having expedited the Broad patent the USPTO then reviewed the work of UC et al, as if they had happened subsequently to the Broad patent being issued, rather than previously. Also the question is raised as to whether in the expedited process the USPTO actually looks at wat is in its in-tray, just to make sure they don't award a patent to the wrong party.
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