Scientists Battle in Court Over Lucrative Patents for Gene-Editing Tool

Everybody was really excited about CRISPR for a while. The excitement has died down. Why?

More people came to understsand that CRISPR is just a useful tool, another one we've borrowed from the wonderful bacteria. Like restriction endonucleases, the new tech transforms how we do many processes in the lab, and probably also in the hospital.

However, that's all it is. A tool. A tool that makes what was really hard slightly easier. Modifying the DNA of a genome in place was always the easy part. Biology does that all the time (viruses, lambda switch, yeast mating types, etc).

Figuring out what to change the DNA to, ensuring the modification is 100% accurate, in the right place, and no off-target effects, those are all harder problems. Biology requires thousands to millions of years to improve on phenotypes, and we're just now starting to realize how hard it is to change one part of the genome without adjusting for that change in a million other locations.

And CRISPR/cas9- the tech being argued over. It's not even that useful. It's blunt-end joining, newer techniques with fewer off target effects using overlap joining are being worked out. cas9 might be obsolete before anybody even gets a Nobel Prize for it!

Applying existing technology in a novel way should not be patentable.

Not mentioned in this article is Cpf1, another CRISPR enzyme which is unambiguously owned by the Broad Institute and may have less off-target activity compared to Cas9. It could easily be that this entire disagreement is over nothing.