Major blow for Broad Institute in European CRISPR patent dispute

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University suffered a setback in its claim to intellectual property relating to the CRISPR gene editing technology yesterday, as the European Patent Office (EPO) revoked a patent granted to the institution.

The patent was withdrawn on the grounds that the Broad Institute had not met EPO requirements to establish that it had been the first to use CRISPR in eukaryotes.

Ireland-based ERS Genomics, a group dedicated to widening access to the groundbreaking technology, said that this ‘priority defect’ was “simply one of those grounds of opposition which was quickly found to be sufficient for the EPO to make the ‘revocation in its entirety’ ruling, and subsequent grounds were not even considered.”