Doudna and co-inventors at UC Berkeley and the University of Vienna filed the first patent application for CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing across all environments.
On May 25, 2012, Jennifer Doudna, together with Emmanuelle Charpentier and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Vienna, filed the first patent application covering the use of CRISPR-Cas9 as a programmable gene-editing tool. The filing came just months after their landmark 2012 Science paper demonstrating that the Cas9 protein could be guided by RNA to cut DNA at precise locations.
This filing was historically significant because it broadly claimed CRISPR-Cas9 applications across all biological environments — bacteria, plants, animals, and human cells — anticipating the technology's eventual sweeping impact across biotechnology, agriculture, and medicine.
The filing initiated what would become one of the most closely watched and consequential patent disputes in modern science, pitting the UC/Vienna team against the Broad Institute, which had separately filed for patents specific to eukaryotic (including human) cell applications and, controversially, received an initial grant first.
This first-to-file event cemented Doudna's team as foundational originators of the CRISPR-Cas9 intellectual property landscape, laying the groundwork for the many licensing agreements, biotech startups, and therapeutic development programs that followed, and underscoring the immense commercial and humanitarian stakes riding on a technology conceived in a university laboratory.