The CRISPR technology has a wide range of target applications, from agronomy to medicine. As we celebrate the 2nd birthday of CRISPR patent analytics services at IPStudies and the 4th year of the CRISPR-Cas9 invention, a few application areas show an increasing competitive activity in the landscape. On CAR-T (chimeric antigen receptor T) cell immunotherapy, we now find more than twenty patent applications in the CRISPR landscape. As could be expected from their marketing/communication, a number of pharmaceutical players and CRISPR technology development pioneers have actively positioned their IP in that domain, namely:
– Novartis (NYSE:NVS), with CRISPR research partners University of Pennsylvania, Intellia Therapeutics and Caribou Biosciences
– Juno Therapeutics (NASDAQ:JUNO) exclusive collaboration with Editas Medicine (NASDAQ:EDIT)
– Seattle Children’s Hospital, which also recently announced a LOI with Juno Therapeutics
– Cellectis (NASDAQ:CLLS)
Not all players, however, run an active marketing & media campaign, so the easiest way to spot them is to watch for their patent applications. Thus, searching for CAR-T coverage in our database of more than 700 CRISPR patent families by end May 2016, we also discovered silent players as:
– SNIPR Technologies
– Nanjing Kaidi Biotechnology
– Fondazione Matilde Tettamanti Menotti De Marchi Onlus
But conversely, we have not spotted yet (be aware of the 18 months patent application publication delay in most jurisdictions) other players of the CAR T-Cell therapy under scrutiny by the financial biotech analysts; for instance bluebird bio (NASDAQ:BLUE) and Kite Pharma (NASDAQ:KITE) are still absent in the CRISPR landscape.
Do you want to stay tuned on the latest CRISPR patent landscape developments? Contact us to learn more about our CRISPR patent analytics offering!