The soul of academic science is being destroyed, one patent at a time.<\/p>\n
Nowhere is this more evident than in the acrimonious battle between\u00a0the University of California and The Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT over who owns the rights to commercialize gene and genome editing systems based on the\u00a0CRISPR \u00a0immune system of bacteria. There are a dizzying number of patents involved in this dispute, and many more players staking claims to what has the potential to be billions of dollars in royalties down the road. But the heart of the matter is rather simple.<\/p>\n
UC claims it should own broad rights to CRISPR-based gene editing\u00a0because UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna and colleagues were the first to show how a\u00a0protein (Cas9) from the bacterium\u00a0Streptococcus pyogenes<\/em> could be weaponized to permit the easy editing of DNA. (Full disclosure: I am a professor in Doudna’s department). The Broad counters that they should get the rights to the application of CRISPR-based gene editing in humans and other eukaryotes (which include all animals, fungi and plants – i.e. most of the organisms where there is money to be made) because, they assert, The Broad’s Feng Zhang was the first to demonstrate the use of Cas9 in eukaryotic cells.<\/p>\n Last week a panel of judges of\u00a0the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board sided with The Broad, finding that the application of CRISPR-based gene editing\u00a0to humans and other eukaryotes was\u00a0not an\u00a0obvious extension of demonstrating the basic utility of the system, and hence constitutes a separate patentable invention.<\/p>\n I encourage you to read the judges’ decision. Far from being a descent into an\u00a0arcane warren of patent law, as most people seem to expect, this case is very straightforward, resting on the simple question of whether the extension of CRISPR from bacteria and a test tube to human cells would have been expected to work by someone or ordinary skill and experience in the field.\u00a0I don’t agree with the ruling, but the judges offer a lucid and very accessible account of what was presented to them and how they arrived at their decision.<\/p>\n While on the surface this case seems like a fairly\u00a0mundane “I invented it first! No I did!” dispute, albeit with unusually large\u00a0financial stakes, to me it represents something far\u00a0more important: a battle for the very soul of academic science and the principles upon which it is based.<\/p>\n When I first heard, in 2012, that scientists in the Doudna lab had discovered that the Cas9 protein cuts\u00a0DNA at a specific point based on instructions in a small piece of RNA, and that they had invented a way to simplify its application, I didn’t give a moment’s thought to patents. Instead I marveled that evolution, through the\u00a0never ending fight between organisms and\u00a0the viruses that plague them, had created a protein whose key properties were\u00a0just what was needed to\u00a0allow molecular biologist to easily edit the DNA of their favorite organism.<\/p>\n If academic science worked like it should we all would have spent the subsequent five years focused only on figuring out all the cool things we could do with this new toy – and there are a lot of cool things. But where we should have seen nothing but scientific opportunity, many saw dollar signs, and the flurry of CRISPR activity beginning in 2012 has become as much a patent gold rush as a journal of discovery.<\/p>\n The academic quest for patents is no longer the side story. Where once\u00a0technology licensing staff rushed\u00a0to secure intellectual property before scientists blab about their work, patents now, in many\u00a0quarters, dominate the game. Experiments are done to stake out claims, new discoveries are held in secrecy and\u00a0talks and publication are delayed so as not to interfere with patent claims. This is bad enough.\u00a0But the most worrying trend has\u00a0been the willingness of some researchers and research institutions to distort history, demean their colleagues and misrepresent the scientific process to support these efforts.<\/p>\n And while all of academia\u00a0is complicit, The Broad Institute has taken the game to a new level.\u00a0In 2015, as the patent fight was heating up, The Broad published a “CRISPR timeline<\/a>” which defined history as ending with\u00a0Feng Zhang’s demonstration of CRISPR gene editing in human cells. It also demoted\u00a0the work from Berkeley to\u00a0playing second fiddle to the work of\u00a0Virginijus Siksnys’s group who, conveniently, did not have a competing patent claim.<\/p>\n The Broad set up a website<\/a> describing their patent claims, which includes the following statement:<\/p>\n In April, 2014, the USPTO granted Patent No. 8,697,359 to Broad Institute, MIT and Dr. Feng Zhang. This Patent (which draws priority from a provisional patent application filed in December 2012) contained successful experiments<\/span>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Implying, absurdly, that the Berkeley application did not.<\/p>\n Then there was\u00a0The Broad Institute Director Eric Lander’s widely derided “Heroes of CRISPR<\/a>” essay in\u00a0Cell<\/em> which further rewrote history. Written under the conceit of giving credit to forgotten scientists, Lander wove a sweeping story of scientists toiling in obscurity until The Broad stepped in an made their work important. Doudna and her close collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier were once again reduced to bit players in this narrative.<\/p>\n This was all clearly done as part of a public relations strategy to support their patent case, in which the assault on reality continued.<\/p>\n