Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Interference declared in CRISPR patent dispute

Among several news sources, the journal NATURE has noted that an interference has been declared in the CRISPR gene editing area.

See Bitter fight over CRISPR patent heats up. Unusual battle among academic institutions holds key to gene-editing tool’s future use.

The nature report contains a rather naive (and incorrect) statement:


Arti Rai, a legal scholar at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, says that it is unusual for academic research institutions to battle so intensely over a patent. Instead, such institutions usually come to an agreement to share rights to the invention. “This seems more bitter than disputes I’ve heard of in the past,” she adds.



These folks must have been asleep during the WARF embryonic stem cell re-exams!

See also the IPBiz post: http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2006/07/more-on-warf-cirm-conflict-in-research.html

See also: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/545411/crispr-dispute-to-be-decided-by-patent-office/

**On 11 March 2015, IPBiz wrote:


US 8,945,839 issued on February 3, 2015. A "Track I" request had been made on 18 April 2014. A final rejection was issued on 18 Nov. 2014, with claims 1-28 rejected as anticipated over Jinek, WO'772 (later identified as Doudna). There was an issue of whether or not the priority documents to WO 2013/176772 supported the later disclosure. In this, there was an issue that the patent applicant had presented only arguments of counsel, with the examiner citing to In re Huang, 100 F.3d 136, 139 (CAFC 1996 ) and In re De Blauwe, 736 F.2d 699, 705 (CAFC 1984 ). Applicant brought up arguments made to the EPO about a Jinek journal publication, which were not of interest to the USPTO.
In a response filed 1 Dec. 2014, applicant was especially harsh to the Doudna application: "Doudna is nothing more than a mere 'second comer' and had no CRISPR-Cas invention prior to Feng Zhang."



The Dec. 1 response by Zhang showed that the examiner had considered Doudna's PCT '6772, so the examiner was not unaware of Doudna's work.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home