USPTO granted U.S. Patent No. 10,428,352, making UC's the largest CRISPR-Cas9 patent portfolio in the United States.
On October 1, 2019, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted U.S. Patent No. 10,428,352 to the University of California team. With this grant, UC Berkeley News reported that the university's collection of CRISPR-Cas9 patents had become the largest CRISPR-Cas9 patent portfolio in the United States.
This milestone represented the culmination of years of sustained patent filings and grants stemming from Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier's foundational 2012 discovery of the programmable CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing system. Despite the earlier setback of the Broad Institute securing the first U.S. CRISPR patent in 2014, the University of California's steady accumulation of patent grants throughout 2018 and 2019 ultimately surpassed competitors in sheer portfolio size and scope.
The scale of this portfolio gave the University of California, and by extension Doudna's affiliated companies such as Caribou Biosciences, significant leverage in licensing negotiations across the rapidly growing CRISPR biotechnology industry, spanning applications from agricultural biotechnology to human therapeutics.
This achievement underscored how, despite prolonged and high-profile legal disputes over CRISPR's early patent history, the University of California team's foundational scientific contributions ultimately translated into substantial and lasting intellectual property influence, cementing Doudna's institutional legacy at Berkeley alongside her personal scientific acclaim.