Potatoes with reduced cold sweetening. Thoughts about patents.

A 20 April 2015 post by Antonio Regalado in MIT Tech Rev begins:

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Dan Voytas is a plant geneticist at the University of Minnesota. But two days a week he stops studying the fundamentals of DNA engineering and heads to a nearby company called Cellectis Plant Sciences, where he applies them.

His newest creation, described in a plant journal this month, is a Ranger Russet potato that doesn’t accumulate sweet sugars at typical cold storage temperatures. That will let it last longer, and when it’s fried it won’t produce as much acrylamide, a suspected carcinogen.

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IPBiz notes Published US patent application    20140178561 with second inventor Voytas (and third Feng Zhang) titled   POTATOES WITH REDUCED COLD-INDUCED SWEETENING and assigned to Cellectis.

IPBiz also notes published US patent application 20140273235 with first inventor Voytas titled
ENGINEERING PLANT GENOMES USING CRISPR/Cas SYSTEMS .  

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The Regalado post includes the text

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In August, the U.S. Department of Agriculture told Cellectis that unlike transgenic plants, its potato wouldn’t be regulated. That means instead of being grown in fenced-in test plots and generating folder upon folder of safety data, the Ranger Russet may go quickly to the market. Two years ago the agency reached a similar conclusion when it considered a DNA-edited corn plant developed by Dow AgroSciences, although it isn’t being sold yet.

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Additionally, the Regalado post notes

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As for Voytas, this isn’t the first time he has set out to gene-edit plants. A decade ago he started a company called Phytodyne based on an earlier technology, called zinc finger nucleases, but it folded after Dow AgroSciences paid more than $50 million for exclusive rights to use that type of gene editing in plants.

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One recalls the August 2005 article in Nature Biotechnology by Christopher Thomas Scott which quotes Voytas:


rather than pursue a commercial strategy, I've decided I'd rather disseminate the technology.

(From Nature Biotechnology, vol. 23 at 917)

As a matter of timeline, in 2005, Feng Zhang was at grad school at Stanford.  As posted elsewhere on IPBiz, there is possibly a patent interference arising between the work of Doudna and of Zhang.  

As to Cellectis and CRISPR, recall: 

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Cellectis patent surprises biopharma, could block CRISPR

By Fiona Barry, 09-Jan-2015

A patent issued to French biotech Cellectis threatens to block gene editing tools currently in use by several big pharma and service companies.

http://www.biopharma-reporter.com/Markets-Regulations/Cellectis-patent-surprises-biopharma-could-block-CRISPR

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**Link to Regalado post titled A Potato Made with Gene Editing  

From the comments of the Regalado post:

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It is a GMO. But it might avoid regulations and stigma associated with GMOs. The regulations aren't different, it's just that regulations developed to assure the safety of "transgenic" plants (with a gene from a different species) may not apply to plants that contain edits of their own genomes achieving results within the scope of what you could get through breeding.

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TALENs is extremely precise and is an editor, it doesn't add genes from another plant it just edits whats already in place, in this case it switches off a certain gene. There would be no cross contamination possible with this method.

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