First EU CRISPR-Cas9 Patent Granted to UC Team

On May 10, 2017, the European Patent Office granted the University of California team, including Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, its first CRISPR-Cas9 patent within the European Union. The patent covered applications of the gene-editing technology in plants, animals, and human cells.

This grant marked an important milestone distinct from the fraught U.S. patent battles, as European patent law follows different procedural standards for determining priority and inventorship. The relatively swift and broad grant in Europe reinforced the international scientific community's recognition of Doudna and Charpentier's team as the foundational inventors of the CRISPR-Cas9 system.

The European patent provided critical commercial certainty for biotechnology companies operating in the EU, including Doudna's own ventures such as Caribou Biosciences and Intellia Therapeutics, allowing them to pursue drug development, agricultural applications, and licensing deals across European markets without the same level of legal ambiguity present in the United States at the time.

This achievement also served as an important counterpoint in the broader global patent narrative, demonstrating that outside the U.S. interference proceedings, patent offices in major jurisdictions largely credited the Doudna-Charpentier team as the original inventors of programmable CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing.