It's not yet clear who will ultimately own this IP, of Doudna, Zhang, Church (in the US, the European patents have other contenders). Last I heard, Doudna and Zhang were set to have dueling lab notebooks. I wouldn't underestimate Church's position either given his record of visionary patents (e.g. Nanopore sequencing). Disclaimer I work in the Church lab.
Sorry for the delay - there are many aspects of this that can be patented. Consider all the following inventions:
- Alterations of the RNA that guides cutting (natural system uses two RNAs, which researchers fuse and alter for efficiency of the mechanism)
- Alterations to the protein for efficiency and specificity (e.g. making it nick instead of cut both strands)
- Methods/strategies (how to express the various features, tethering multiple together, how to select only cells that have the changes you want, etc.)
- Applications (use of this system to do something novel)
However, the largest and most central is the use of the system itself for something that does not occur in nature and is non-obvious. This is a system bacteria use as an immune system against foreign DNA. That is not at all related to genome editing. So if people have a problem ("How do we engineer the genome of this cell?"), and then they come up with a novel strategy ("Let's combine these pieces together, using Cas9/CRISPR to cut, then introduce another piece of DNA in a certain way to serve as a template that hijacks the endogenous DNA repair mechanisms to introduce engineered changes."), that is pretty clearly a process of invention to me.
You can't just patent something existing in nature, and as you can see from the examples above that's not at all what is happening here. There is tons of innovation that is novel and non-obvious.
Because the patent system is outdated. But the supreme court ruled that "synthetic" or "complementary" DNA is eligible for patent protection.
Basically, it's not the discovery of mechanisms, but the unnatural manipulation of them that is patentable.
But some of the rush to the patent office is because it places the onus on challengers; the actual patent takes years to clear, even without complications.
I agree that the patent system is broken. I'm wondering what exactly about the manipulation is patentable given that the manipulations could happen randomly in nature. I was hoping daughart could provide his arguments as someone who works in one of the labs.
I don't see why this is any different than the patenting of chemicals. Lots of chemicals exist in nature, but if you make something "new" why shouldn't that be protected?
