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Harvard and MIT scientists win patent fight over Crispr

The Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., will retain potentially lucrative rights to a powerful gene-editing technique that could lead to major advances in medicine and agriculture, the federal Patent and Trademark Office ruled on Wednesday.

The decision, in a bitterly fought dispute closely watched by scientists and the biotechnology industry, was a blow to the University of California, often said to be the birthplace of the technique, which is known as Crispr-Cas9.

An appeals board of the patent office ruled that the gene-editing inventions claimed by the two institutions were separate and do not overlap.

The result is that the Broad Institute, a research center affiliated with M.I.T. and Harvard, gets to retain more than a dozen patents it has already been granted on the use of the Crispr technique to modify DNA in the cells of humans, animals and plants.

Read more at The New York Times
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