The Broad Institute received the first U.S. CRISPR-Cas9 patent, intensifying the patent dispute with Doudna's UC Berkeley team.
On April 15, 2014, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard the first United States patent covering CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing, specifically for its use in eukaryotic cells, including human cells.
This grant came despite the UC Berkeley/University of Vienna team, led by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, having filed their own foundational patent application nearly two years earlier, in May 2012. The Broad Institute, led by Feng Zhang, had used an expedited review process to secure their patent faster, triggering a bitter and prolonged interference proceeding before the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board.
This event is central to understanding the historical arc of Doudna's CRISPR legacy: although her team is broadly credited scientifically as having first demonstrated and published the programmable RNA-guided Cas9 system in bacterial and in vitro contexts, the Broad Institute's faster patent processing created years of legal contention over who held rights to the technology's lucrative eukaryotic and human-cell applications.
The dispute, chronicled extensively in Nature Biotechnology and other scientific literature, highlighted the complex interplay between scientific priority and patent law, and shaped how CRISPR-based biotechnology companies structured licensing deals for years afterward.