The billion-dollar CRISPR patent battle: A case of big money shaping science

Yes, because god forbid a biologist get rich contributing to humanity.

Well the Zhang lab did find another CRISPR based system that sidesteps the Cas9-based patents [1].

[1] http://www.cell.com/abstract/S0092-8674(15)01200-3

This is already done, and currently disputed patent is not as important as the article claims. Quoting from http://www.ipscell.com/2016/01/patent-expert-weighs-in-on-cr...

Q. Are there elements to this patent situation that most people are overlooking?

A. Probably the most important thing that people are overlooking is the scope of the claimed subject material of the Doudna patent application (and also the Zhang patents in question); only Cas9 is claimed. The claims do not cover other nucleases that could work with CRISPR (such as Zhang’s recently published Cpf1, which is "smaller and easier to program than Cas9") and thus would not exclude someone from using other nucleases.

There are at least two other proteins that work similar to CRISPR as a homing system to find particular DNA sequences in the body (Talens & Zinc Fingers). The big difference is that they're much slower and trickier on the R&D side - with CRISPR being slightly more complicated, but much faster to apply to your System of Interest. This is precisely why there is such a land-rush with CRISPR right now - it's easy to port to whatever system you're already working with.

In fact, I'd likely predict that at the end of the day the CRISPR system is used to find the interesting therapies, but it will likely need to be 'hardened' into one of the above, older technologies to actually become a good deliverable therapeutic. CRISPR is inherently a 2-part system, where one of those parts would be really tricky to get the body to use reliably without error or screwing things up, whereas the older techs could effectively be delivered as a single genetic insert. It's just much harder to scan the search space with those older techs.