On October 17 at 2:20pm, Alicia Russo will be a panelist at the IP Watchdog Masters taking place at the IP Watchdog Studios in Ashburn, Virginia. Alicia will be joining the panel, "The CRISPR Patent Wars: Implication for Human Medical Use" alongside Brent Bellows, Partner at Knowles Intellectual Property Strategy and Jennifer King, Assistant General Counsel at Taconic Biosciences. You can find out more about the panel discussion below.
The CRISPR Patent Wars: Implication for Human Medical Use
Few current technologies bring as much hope and promise to biotech as CRISPR-CAS genome editing technology. The incredible discovery was first reported in 2012 by Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna, landing them the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2020, and promises to revolutionize basic and applied sciences. Since the discovery 11 short years ago, the technology has been deployed in a vast array of uses, including by medical researchers seeking to cure inherited diseases. Remarkably, the first CRISPR-based human therapeutic–exagamglogene autotemcel (Vertex and CRISPR Therapeutics), which replaces a defective beta-globin gene with a repaired version in patients suffering from sickle cell anemia—has been granted a PDUFA date of December 8, 2023. Looming over the use of CRISPR-CAS, however, is a series of high-profile patent challenges that span multiple entities, leaving the state of licensing and technology transfer of this technology in uncertain flux, and creating freedom to operate clearance challenges for companies looking to commercialize this technology for human medical uses. Join us as we explore the various patent issues, policy issues, and licensing issues that have enveloped the use of CRISPR.