Pivotal CRISPR patent battle won by Broad Institute | Hacker News Reader

Pivotal CRISPR patent battle won by Broad Institute

nature.com

56 pointsajonnav14 comments

What would a world with commercialized CRISPR technology look like? Will they just sit in the back and collect fees like the MP3 patent owners? Or will they spin-off and became the Google of DNA editing?

It's good to keep in mind that CRISPR is but one technique to do gene splicing, it's not the concept itself. Different ways will be discovered now that it's proven to be viable.

It is also worth noting that TALENs were implemented for genome editing [0] before CRISPR/Cas9 [1]. And that there are ongoing trials in human subjects that use TALENs for editing instead of Cas9 [2].

Though I agree with a sibling comment that we might not find another system with the same advantages as CRISPR/Cas9 (ie, only having to generate RNAs to engineer site specificity, rather than the more intensive task of generating a protein coding sequence like you do with TALENs).

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21179091 [1] https://www.broadinstitute.org/what-broad/areas-focus/projec... [2] http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/new-gene-editing-trea...

I think we've known it would be useful for a long time, we have had general editing capabilities for a long time, they have just been less precise/customizable. So I don't think a new one will be easily found.

Australian universities hold the patent on Wi-Fi. A fraction of sales of all hardware Wi-Fi devices goes to fund higher education in Australia.

I find it odd that we have state run/non-profit universities fighting over this. Something about the funding model at the academic level is truly fundamentally broken.

we’re about to find out. Editas Pharmaceuticals is, i believe, the sole commercial licensee by the Broad for CRISPR/Cas-9, and they are scheduled to begin human trials for a rare form of blindness in October.

I would be very interested in knowing more about how Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals compares. The buzzword seems to be "RNA interference", but I don't really know what that means in context.

I'm wondering, is there a hacker news for biohacking related stuff?

I have the feeling that there is a lot of progress being made in gene therapy technology these days. Having a friend who's life would be enhanced by gene therapy, I'm highly interested!

Gene therapy has had some recent successes [0], but it is worth noting that many of the ongoing and recent clinical gene therapy trials don’t necessarily involve genome editing: go to clinicaltrials.gov, search ‘gene therapy’ and get 3741 results. Search ‘CRISPR’ or ‘TALEN’ and get ~21 results.

Edit: I should say that most of the gene therapy clinical trials don’t involve genome editing yet. Though it seems to me that, at least for some diseases, viral vectors that deliver DNA to cells without integrating DNA into the host cell genome (where the dna instead persists inside the cells episomally, and is maybe lost from the cells after some number of divisions) will have advantages over integrating vectors/genome editing-based approaches. That way, you don’t have to worry about the off-target effects of genome editing, and you have a treatment that doesn’t result in permanent changes to the genome.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4879992/

Closest I know of is Fierce Biotech https://www.fiercebiotech.com/

thanks a lot!

Sadly, I don't think so. Check your local meetups. Additionally, SynBioBeta has been an ok source for recent biotech news.

Lobste.rs is open source and you could potentially spin up an instance of it specific to some topic you're interested in.

https://write.narwhal.space/ was an attempt at making an instance for writers, but it seems to have gone into disrepair.

Sucks for UC, but I'm sure if the situations had been reversed they would've fought as hard for the patent as the Broad has.

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