Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna just received a few hours ago the Nobel prize in Chemistry 2020 for “the development of a method of genome editing”, namely their 2012 discovery of the CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors which basically enables to “cut and paste” DNA. This scientific discovery has fueled an unprecedented biotechnology development in the past 8 years. When we started to analyze the genome editing patent landscape in Spring 2014, there were only 96 patent families(*) in our records in relation with CRISPR. We have now more than 7400 in our latest records – and adding an average of 200 more every month in 2020. What does this data tell us on who has taken advantage in engineering new life sciences solutions out of this amazing scientific discovery, now confirmed worth a Nobel Prize?
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Myths and realities on DuPont CRISPR assets
On the agriculture side, IAM just published this week some basic quantitative data analytics spotting DuPont as the leader in CRISPR patent assets. The IAM interview also highlighted some questions about the licensing position of DuPont in the CRISPR patent battle. This was quite surprising to read for us as this information has been publicly known since 2014 and regularly compiled in both our patent and licensing landscapes. Let’s take a closer scrutiny into the DuPont CRISPR assets. In our monitoring of licensing data since 2014, we have actually spotted DuPont Pioneer as one of the earliest player to position their licensing-in in a very strategic way:
Recent developments in the CRISPR patent landscape
The CRISPR patent landscape keeps on developing with now an average of two new patent publications every day. We have now searched, reviewed and categorized 1198 patent families in our February 2016 CRISPR patent analytics data set. The recent conclusions by the USPTO on the CRISPR pioneering patent interference has received significant media attention and finally confirmed the diversity of the CRISPR licensing landscape. We have provided our 2017 key findings to a number of analysts in the field, and are working hard to keep on extracting and sorting meaningful CRISPR patent coverage information for our customers on a monthly basis.
More CRISPR interfering inventors may come from Vilnius
Earlier this month, we were interviewed by The Scientist regarding the side inventorship dispute between Feng Zhang and Luciano Marraffini on some of the Broad patent applications. Public registers at the USPTO, WIPO and the EPO expose further details of the otherwise un-publicized legal battles for invention ownership between their employers (the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and Rockfeller University), back from the 2012-2013 early filings.
Balancing IP expenses and IP revenue – lessons from the CNRS challenge
Mid November, CNRS, the French largest public-funded research organization of more than 26000 employees, primarily researchers and engineers, announced a new technology transfer program for about 25% of their 4500 patent families portfolio. This is just yet another move in the patent monetization trend – and some of the financial figures at stake, more easily available for this public organization than for corporate world ones, deserve a closer scrutiny.