STAT News reported that the legal fight over CRISPR-Cas9 patents entered a sharper phase in August 2016, as the University of California and the Broad Institute traded increasingly pointed filings with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
At the center of the dispute: whether Broad Institute researcher Feng Zhang deserves separate patent rights for adapting CRISPR gene editing to work in mouse and human cells, building on foundational work published by UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna and her collaborators in 2012.
UC argued that once Doudna’s discovery became public, extending it to human and animal cells was a predictable next step that any skilled molecular biologist could have managed using standard lab techniques. The Broad countered that Zhang’s work represented a genuine scientific leap, not an obvious extension, and therefore merited its own patent claims.
Sharper argumants
One of the sharper moments in the filings involved an email from a former member of Zhang’s lab, a graduate student named Shuailiang Lin, who wrote to Doudna in February 2015 claiming that early CRISPR experiments in Zhang’s lab had failed and that he alone had worked on the project during that period.
The Broad Institute disputed the email’s relevance, stating that Lin had only visited briefly through an academic exchange program and left before Zhang’s key results were achieved, and that his account wasn’t supported by evidence.
Underlying invention
Legal experts quoted in the piece suggested the case might turn less on who discovered what first and more on a narrower technical question: whether Doudna’s and Zhang’s patent claims even covered the same underlying invention. UC’s original application described editing DNA in simple, single-celled organisms, while the Broad Institute’s application covered editing in more complex cells with a nucleus, the kind found in mice and humans.
The dispute carried high financial and reputational stakes for both institutions, given CRISPR’s rapidly growing importance across biotech and medicine. This account is drawn from reporting in STAT News.