Event Listing

The many disputes over the proper patent priority award for CRISPR technology (the acronym standing for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) has been waged for over a decade, fought by four separate groups of purported inventors, and at present, for which there is no end in sight.

There are four competitors: Broad Institute, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (collectively, “Broad”) and The University of California/Berkeley, the University of Vienna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier (collectively, “CVC”), which have been engaged in two separate interferences (Nos. 106,048 and 106,115). In the earlier interference Broad convinced the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) that there was no interference in fact, based on their argument that CVC’s earlier invention of CRISPR in prokaryotic cells did not entitle them to priority to Broad’s invention of CRISPR in eukaryotes. In the most recent ’115 interference the PTAB awarded priority to Broad but the Federal Circuit vacated that decision and remanded; that proceeding awaits further action by the parties and the Board. The nature of the panel’s questioning at oral argument and the reasoning in its decision suggest that CVC has a good chance of prevailing on remand.

The two other parties, ToolGen (a Korean company) and Sigma-Adrich each have separate pending interferences against Broad and CVC. These interferences have been stayed pending the final outcome of the priority determination between Broad and CVC (in each instance it is expected that the interference with the losing party will be dismissed and those against the prevailing party will proceed). Depending on those outcomes there may be yet another interference between ToolGen and Sigma.

In addition to this history the talk will consider the arguments and relative strengths and weaknesses of the parties’ positions and the consequences should any of the parties ultimately be awarded priority.