68 GERMINATION.CA JANUARY 2019 WHO OWNS CRISPR? That’s a billion- dollar question, literally. Those involved in life sciences are closely watching the developments. In 2012, Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, published the first paper on the enzyme in Science, and in May of that year, Berkeley filed a patent application for the basic CRISPR technology. In December of 2012, the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT filed an application but paid an extra fee for an expedited route to patent CRISPR in eukaryotic cells (those in plants, animals and people). In 2017, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted Feng Zhang and the Broad team the patent for using CRISPR-Cas9 to edit DNA in mammals. Doudna’s team appealed the deci- sion but the USPTO’s patent trial and appeal board decided in favor of the Broad. Their reason: the two teams’ discoveries didn’t overlap and that the Broad’s patents covered a truly separate innovation. Again the Berkeley team appealed that decision, and it went before fed- eral judges in Washington, D.C., April 30. They lost the appeal. Earlier in 2018, the USPTO awarded UC-Berkeley its first CRISPR- related patent; it focuses on using CRISPR-Cas9 to edit single-stranded RNA (not DNA). A second patent came shortly after, which centers The question is unanswered, but one life science company had the foresight to corral the right licensing agreements from both inventing parties. Julie Deering WHOOWNSCRISPR? 4.  DNA repairs itself. Engineered sequence of DNA can be inserted into the gene to further modify it. HOW CRISPR-CAS9 WORKS 1.  Researcher identifies a specific sequence of DNA to modify. 2.  Researcher engineers a guide RNA to match the targeted DNA sequence. Guide RNA is attached to a DNA-cutting enzyme known as Cas9. 3.  Guide RNA finds targeted DNA sequence on the genome. Cas9 cuts the DNA strand at the target, preparing it for repair or replacement. 514 is the number of patents and applications globally owned by Corteva Agriscience, formerly DowDuPont. 100 new CRISPR-related inventions are disclosed every month. $6.28 billion is the potential market value of CRISPR by 2022. around using the standard CRISPR- Cas9 system to edit regions specifi- cally 10-15 base pairs long. To date, there are more than 60 CRISPR-related patents in the United States that have been awarded to inventors at 18 different organiza- tions. But globally, there are more than 18,000 individual patent applica- tions and granted patents, according to Jack Hopwood, a consultant with Clarivate Analytics. According to one report, the market for this gene-editing technol- ogy is expected to rise from $3.19 billion in 2017 to $6.28 billion by 2022. Chris Donegan, co-founder