CRISPR-Cas9 Gene Editing

I got back into Editas (EDIT) along with Intellia (NTLA) and both have been on the move, especially NTLA. This could be a huge market mover if the FDA current trials prove successful.

Same here, sold my KITE at a 20% gain, and bought EDIT @ $19.04 last week....

Gene Editing is moving quickly towards being a medical breakthrough with many applications. Why, because of it's simplicity. 

The system, known as Crispr-Cas9, is embroiled in a high-stakes patent dispute for control over what many scientists believe is a groundbreaking technology that serves as a kind of multipurpose molecular scissors that can cut DNA and make repairs and insert changes into genes. Crispr’s power and versatility, they argue, open the door to new therapies that could potentially correct often intractable genetic diseases.

Dr. Irv Arons, who would post on ICell, brought this new technology to everyone's attention a few years ago, and as a blogger, has written articles regarding this technology. Meet Author Irv Arons and Learn More about Gene Therapy and Gene Editing for Eye Disease

I own, perhaps prematurely, two of the main companies that are embroiled in this patent lawsuit, Editas (EDIT) & Intellia (NTLA), and I believe that whoever triumphs in the patent suit, will make people rich. I understand there will be a decision due sometime late fall.

This is an area which serious Biotech  investors should keep on their radar


From the WSJ Tonight: Link Below

Breakthrough Gene Technology Attracts Investors Amid Patent Dispute

Deals continue to be signed for gene-editing tool called Crispr-Cas9

Jennifer Doudna, left, of the University of California, Berkeley, and French researcher Emmanuelle Charpentier, center, are allied against Feng Zhang, a scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, in a fight for the rights to the gene-editing tool Crispr.

Jennifer Doudna, left, of the University of California, Berkeley, and French researcher Emmanuelle Charpentier, center, are allied against Feng Zhang, a scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, in a fight for the rights to the gene-editing tool Crispr. 

Last month, Bayer AG opened the doors on a $335 million joint venture with Crispr Therapeutics to develop therapies using a new gene-editing tool. Later this year, rival Editas Medicine Inc. will move into larger digs as it, too, races ahead with a $200 million-plus effort to leverage the gene-editing tool into new drugs.



Companies working on this special technology have raised over $600 million since 2013 in venture capital and the public markets, researchers at Montana State University estimated in 2015. More deals continue to be signed, and this month Crispr Therapeutics said it plans to go public and wants to raise up to another $90 million.



The flurry belies the fact that the companies don’t actually know yet who owns the intellectual-property rights to the technology.





The system, known as Crispr-Cas9, is embroiled in a high-stakes patent dispute for control over what many scientists believe is a groundbreaking technology that serves as a kind of multipurpose molecular scissors that can cut DNA and make repairs and insert changes into genes. Crispr’s power and versatility, they argue, open the door to new therapies that could potentially correct often intractable genetic diseases.



There have been other gene-editing tools before, and scientists are working on additional ones. But part of the excitement over the Crispr-Cas9 system is that it is easier to use than previous gene-editing technology. It also can target more than one gene at the same time, making it more efficient.




Scientists have high hopes for a new gene-editing technology that could provide them with unprecedented power to rewrite the code of life. WSJ’s Monika Auger reports. (Originally published June 28, 2015)

The different Crispr companies are hoping to develop treatments for diseases like hemophilia, cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy, among others. Doctors are planning to test Crispr therapies in cancer. Some scientists are even exploring the application of Crispr to revive extinct species like the woolly mammoth or to modify organs in pigs so they might someday be transplanted into humans.



Science is always a fraught, risky enterprise, but even by those standards this current fight to control Crispr-Cas9 is messy.



Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley and Emmanuelle Charpentier, then of the University of Vienna, applied in 2013 for a patent for using Crispr-Cas9 to edit genes. So did Feng Zhang, a scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, in Cambridge, Mass., a few months later. But his patent was granted first, in 2014.



The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is currently hearing a challenge by the Berkeley-Vienna group, which says it invented the gene editor first and should get the rights to the technology.



Rewriting the CodeScientists can use the gene-editing technology called Crispr-Cas9 to correct disease-causing mutations. Here’s how it works. (Source: Innovative Genomics Inititative Credit: John Gould/The Wall Street Journal)



A chunk of RNA is programmed to look for a specific problem segment of DNA. It is paired with a natural protein called Cas9 taken from bacteria, where it functions as a genetic scalpel.



Once inserted into a cell, the RNA/Cas9 combination looks for a DNA sequence that matches its RNA.



When it finds a match, the Cas9 cuts both strands of the DNA



Repair enzymes can fill and seal the gap in the DNA with new genetic information to change the underlying genetic code.

This month, it got even more complicated when ToolGen, a Seoul-based biotech, said it was awarded a patent for Crispr-Cas9 gene editing in Korea. Seokjoong Kim, research director at ToolGen, said the company is also pursuing a claim with the USPTO, though an examiner hasn’t yet deemed the claims patentable.



The ToolGen announcement “adds to the uncertainty” facing companies pursuing Crispr, says Brent Babcock, an Orange Country, Calif.-based partner at Knobbe, Martens, Olson & Bear LLP, and has to make investors wonder, “Who else may come out of the woodwork?”



Many players laying claim to the key patent have launched companies to pursue research and licensing, creating a thicket of licensing options for biotechs and institutions to consider, depending on how they want to use the technology.



FLURRY OF DEALS



The Numbers : Read more about some of the companies that are racing to develop therapies using the Crispr-Cas9 gene-editing system, without waiting to see who wins the patent dispute.



Broad’s Dr. Zhang is a co-founder of Editas Medicine. Dr. Charpentier, now of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, is a co-founder of Crispr Therapeutics, and Dr. Doudna, who helped found and then left Editas, is a co-founder of Caribou Biosciences Inc. and Intellia Therapeutics Inc. And there is a welter of other startups with rights to various uses and other technologies related to Crispr.



On Thursday, Monsanto Co. announced it had reached a deal with the Broad Institute to license the gene-editing tool for use in agriculture. The St. Louis, Mo.-based company said the license would deliver an array of crop improvements.





Patent experts say companies must decide whether to choose a side from among these, perhaps license from more than one to hedge their bets, or just use the technology and seek a license only when necessary.



It is a key question facing many technology-driven businesses, says Elisabeth Evert, an intellectual-property lawyer at Dallas-based Hitchcock Evert, and “at the end of the day, each company will just have to determine their tolerance for risk.”



Companies that wait, or license from what turns out to be the losing side, may have to give up more equity or pay a massive fee for a license from the side it bet against. “Spite,” says Jacob S. Sherkow, an associate professor at New York Law School, who has followed the Crispr dispute, “is typically part of any intellectual-property strategy.”



Some legal experts said that with the rights in dispute, the risk of getting sued for patent infringement is low, and a company without cash for multiple licenses in the U.S. could be better off pushing ahead with its own research and waiting until the dispute is resolved.



At Fulcrum Therapeutics in Cambridge, Mass., which is developing therapies for diseases like Fragile X syndrome and a form of muscular dystrophy, CEO Robert Gould says its scientists didn’t want to wait. Fulcrum was launched earlier this year with $55 million in financing from Third Rock Ventures LLC, also a founding investor in Editas.



Fulcrum is working with Horizon Discovery Group, a contract-research organization that has licenses from various parties to use Crispr. Mr. Gould said any drugs that Fulcrum develops “will be the subject of our IP that we protect and it will be our discovery.”



A spokeswoman for Crispr Therapeutics says the company doesn’t comment on the patent dispute. Executives and spokesmen for the other companies licensing out Crispr rights expressed confidence in their intellectual property and the ability for drug discovery to move forward.

WSJ Article on Gene Editing Patent disputes

Things are heating up in the field of Gene Editing. Today CRSP went live with an IPO. This company is partly owned by Emmanuelle Charpentier, one of the parties that is contesting patent rights. This is a under reported field of science that once is brought into the light with clinical successes, has the potential give returns ala Regeneron. 


This is a good write up on the main players in what is bing described as the development of the century. It is well worth the click & read. I own EDIT, NTLA and will buy CRSP once I can determine the direction after the IPO dust settles.  

What is Crispr

CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. CRISPR is a part of the acquired immune system that protects bacteria and other organisms against attacks by viruses. CRISPRs are regions in a bacterial genome that incorporate a new spacer when a previously unseen virus affects the bacteria. This CRISPR sequence is used to form short mRNAs that attack a matching sequence in the virus and destroy it.

In the lab, scientists design and synthesize RNA sequences (guided RNAs) that match a particular DNA sequence. Once injected into the body, these RNA sequences are guided to the target DNA. Certain enzymes like Cas9 nuclease (attached to the guided RNA) then cleave the desired part of the DNA sequence (for example, knocking off a harmful gene on the DNA).

Investing in the latest Gene Editing companies is getting really, really interesting. I advise to keep these companies on your radar.


Intellia gears up for human testing of CRISPR with new HQ, set to double staffers
by Ben Adams | Dec 2, 2016 3:51am

After getting off its $100 million-plus IPO in the summer, gene editing biotech Intellia Therapeutics is getting ready for human tests of its preclinical CRISPR tech with new digs designed to help bolster its research capabilities.

The biotech, which has the backing and partnerships of the likes of Atlas, Novartis and Regeneron, is on the move as it heads over to its new lab facilities at 40 Erie Street, in Cambridge, MA.

“The field of genome editing is rapidly evolving and our work to develop therapies for patients requires that we have the infrastructure necessary for R&D growth and prepare for preclinical studies and clinical trials,” said Dr. Nessan Bermingham, CEO and founder of Intellia Therapeutics.

“To reach our goals, we continue to recruit top talent and ensure our quality workforce has the appropriate facilities and tools necessary to translate CRISPR/Cas9 into life-transforming products.”

The new facility is deisgned to allow Intellia to push on with its scientific programs and to “continue to leverage our Massachusetts location alongside leading biotech research and academic institutions,” Dr. Bermingham added.

The new Intellia headquarters was specifically designed to house its growing R&D, operations teams and admin staff, the biotech said, as it heads towards clinical testing.

Intellia added that it will also be maintaining ops at its current facility at 130 Brookline Street in Cambridge. The new research digs will however boost Intellia’s total lab and office space from the current 15,000 sq. ft. to more than 80,000 sq. ft., allowing it to double its team to more than 200 employees.

It got off its $108 million public offering back in May, money which will be used to push on with R&D programs for its candidates through to the submission of at least one IND, according to its SEC-1 filing at the time.

The biotech also said it will splash out on the “acquisition of businesses or technologies” for its research programs.

This includes progressing its in vivo and ex vivo pipeline product candidates, as well as further developing its delivery technologies and CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing platform.

One of its in vivo candidates, which targets transthyretin amyloidosis (ATTR), a life-threatening disease caused by misfolded transthyretin proteins that accumulate as amyloid fibrils in multiple organs, is being co-developed with Regeneron.

This is one potential candidate that could be advanced to IND-enabling trials in the next 12 to 24 months, according to the company.

In the ex vivo field, Intellia is working with Novartis on a knockout repair insertion technology using hematopoietic stem cells, with a first IND expected to be submitted in 2018.

Rival CRISPR co Editas, which also went public this year, has already said it aims to have its first program for a rare form of blindness called Leber congenital amaurosis in clinical trials by next year.

In yet another headline today: New CRISPR Experiment Corrects Clotting in Mice

The future of gene editing is slowly approaching great promise. Recent developments surrounding CRISPR/Cas9 showed its efficiency and promise in correcting disease-causing mutations. For the first time, it was used to develop a dual gene therapy to treat hemophilia B in mice, which normally leads to a defective clotting protein.

This proves the potential of CRISPR as a method of in vivo genome editing not just for conditions such as hemophilia but potentially other diseases as well.

And also today it was reported:Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies say they have partially restored vision in genetically blind rats with a new gene editing technique. If proven safe, the method could greatly extend the use of gene therapy in people.

I likely won't have any free funds for a while as I'm tied up in another revolution (3dprint) that will take a while to realize any gains, but still, thanks for sharing as it's an interesting development of a company I had never heard of before. Wish you and others invested with this one good luck.

Just finished up with the hearing at the United States patent and trademark office which is located just outside of Washington DC. I got here at 8:15, an hour and 45 minutes before they would let you in and the line had already formed to capacity. They had to use three overflow rooms to handle everybody and still many people were turned away from the hearings. I had the chance to speak to multiple patent attorneys and journalist. I spoke with journalist from Nature, Science, Bloomberg, and other news sources I was not familiar with. The girl I spoke with from Nature remembered Advanced Cell Technology and we discussed stem cell research. Exciting day so far, and I am heading over to the debriefing and panel discussion of what we just witnessed.

And speaking of Giants, the CRISPR Pioneers were on the short list today for Time's Person of the year. They were also the frontrunner for the Nobel Prize but were passed up until such time as this patent lawsuit is finalized and a doctor is named. 

TIME Inc. Man of the Year Short List. The CRISPR Pioneers.

Dr. Carl June’s lab at the University of Pennsylvania looks like any other biology research hub. There are tidy rows of black-topped workbenches flanked by shelves bearing boxes of pipettes and test tubes. There’s ad hoc signage marking the different workstations. And there are postdocs buzzing around, calibrating scales, checking incubators and smearing solutions and samples onto small glass slides.

Appearances aside, what June is attempting to do here, on the eighth floor of the glass-encased Smilow Center for Translational Research in Philadelphia, is anything but ordinary. He’s built a career trying to improve the odds for people with intractable end-stage disease, and now, in the university’s brand-new cell-processing lab, he’s preparing to launch his most ambitious study yet: he’s going to try to treat 18 people with stubborn cancers, and he’s going to do it using CRISPR, the most controversial new tool in medicine.

Developed just four short years ago by two groups—Jennifer Doudna, a molecular and cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, together with Emmanuelle Charpentier, now at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin; and Feng Zhang, a biomedical engineer at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT—CRISPR allows scientists to easily and inexpensively find and alter virtually any piece of DNA in any species. In 2016 alone it was used to edit the genes of vegetables, sheep, mosquitoes and all kinds of cell samples in labs. Now, even as some scientists call for patience and extreme caution, there’s a worldwide race to push the limits of CRISPR’s capabilities.

June’s ultimate goal is to test CRISPR’s greatest potential: its ability to treat diseases in humans. “Before we were kind of flying in the dark when we were making gene changes,” he says of earlier attempts at genetic tinkering. “With CRISPR, I came to the conclusion that this technology needs to be tested in humans.” The trial, which will start treating patients in a few months, is the first to use this powerful technique in this way. It represents the most extensive manipulation of the human genome ever attempted.



Soon, June’s 18 trial patients will become the first people in the world to be treated with CRISPR’d cells—in this case, cells genetically edited to fight cancer. Like many people with cancer, the patients have run out of options. So, building on work by Doudna, Charpentier and Zhang, June’s team will extract their T cells, a kind of immune cell, and use CRISPR to alter three genes in those cells, essentially transforming them into superfighters. The patients will then be reinfused with the cancer-fighting T cells to see if they do what they’re supposed to do: seek and destroy cancerous tumors.

A lot of hope hangs on the outcome of the trial, but whether it succeeds or fails, it will provide scientists with critical information about what can go right and wrong when they try to rewrite the genetic code in humans. The hope is that studies like June’s will bear out CRISPR’s therapeutic potential, leading to the development of radical new therapies not just for people with the cancers being studied but for all of them, as well as for genetic diseases such as sickle-cell anemia and cystic fibrosis, and chronic conditions like Type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer’s. It may sound far-fetched, but studies like this one are an enormous first step in that direction.

How CRISPR DNA-Editing Works

A brief guide to a ground-breaking new technology.

Using CRISPR on humans is still hugely controversial, in part because it’s so easy. The fact that it allows scientists to efficiently edit any gene—for some cancers, but also potentially for a predisposition for red hair, for being overweight, for being good at math—worries ethicists because of what could happen if it gets into the wrong hands. As of now, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), by far the world’s largest sponsor of scientific research, will not fund studies using CRISPR on human embryos. And any new way of altering genes in human cells must get ethics and safety approval by the NIH, regardless of who is paying for it. (The NIH also opposes the use of CRISPR on so-called germ-line cells—those in an egg, sperm or embryo—since any such changes would be permanent and heritable.)

To fund his study, June was able to attract support from Sean Parker, the former Facebook executive and Silicon Valley entrepreneur behind Napster. Parker recently founded the $250 million Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, a collaboration among six major cancer centers, and June’s study is its first ambitious undertaking. “We need to take big, ambitious bets to advance cancer treatment,” says Parker. “We’re trying to lead the way in doing more aggressive, cutting-edge stuff that couldn’t get funded if we weren’t around.”

That’s not to say June’s study will necessarily cure these cancers. “Either it’s back to the drawing board,” he says, “or everyone goes forward and studies a wide variety of other diseases that could potentially be fixed.” In reality, both things are probably true.

Even if June’s study doesn’t work as he hopes, experts still agree it will be a matter of months—not years—before other privately funded human studies get launched in the U.S. and abroad. An ongoing patent battle over who owns the lucrative technology hasn’t stopped investors from pouring millions into CRISPR companies. So simple and inexpensive is the technique, and so frenzied is the medical community about its potential, that it would be foolish to bet on anything else. “With a technology like CRISPR,” says Doudna, “you’ve lit a fire.”

A Year of Progress

CRISPR’s journey from lab bench to cancer treatment may seem quick. After all, as recently as a couple of years ago only a minuscule number of people even knew what clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats—that’s longhand for CRISPR—was. But the technology is at least hundreds of millions of years old. It was bacteria that originally used CRISPR, as a survival mechanism to fend off infection by viruses. The ultimate freeloaders, viruses never bothered developing their own reproductive system, preferring instead to insert their genetic material into that of other cells—including bacteria. Bacteria fought back, holding on to snippets of a virus’ genes when they were infected. The bacteria would then surround these viral DNA fragments with a genetic sequence that effectively cut them out altogether.

Bacteria have been performing that clever evolutionary stunt for millennia, but it wasn’t until the early 2000s that food scientists at a Danish yogurt company realized just how clever the bacterial system was when they noticed that their cultures were turning too sour. They discovered that the cultures were CRISPRing invaders, altering the taste considerably. It made for bad dairy, but the scientific discovery was immediately recognized as a big one.



About a decade later, in 2012, Doudna and Charpentier tweaked the system to make it more standardized and user-friendly, and showed that not just bacterial DNA but any piece of DNA has this ability. That was a game changer. Scientists have been mucking with plant, animal and human DNA since its structure was first discovered by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953. But altering genes, especially in deliberate, directed ways, has never been easy. “The idea of gene correction is not new at all,” says June. “But before CRISPR it just never worked well enough so that people could do it routinely.”

Within months of Doudna’s and Charpentier’s discovery, Zhang showed that the technique worked to cut human DNA at specified places. With that, genetics changed overnight. Now scientists had a tool allowing them, at least in theory, to wield unprecedented control over any genome, making it possible to delete bits of DNA, add snippets of genetic material and even insert entirely new pieces of code.

Now, that theoretical potential took shape in a remarkable array of real-world applications. CRISPR produced the first mushroom that doesn’t brown, the first dogs with DNA-boosted cells giving them a comic-book-like musculature, and a slew of nutritionally superior crops that are already on their way to market. There are even efforts to use CRISPR’d mosquitoes to fight Zika and malaria.

On the human side, progress has been even more dramatic. In a lab, scientists have successfully snipped out HIV from infected human cells and demonstrated that the process works in infected mice and rats as well. They’re making headway in correcting the genetic defect behind sickle-cell anemia, which stands to actually cure the disease. They’re making equally promising progress in treating rare forms of genetic blindness and muscular dystrophy. And in perhaps the most controversial application of CRISPR to date, in 2016 the U.K. approved the first use of the technology in healthy human embryos for research.

At the Francis Crick Institute in London, developmental biologist Kathy Niakan is using CRISPR to try to understand one of the more enduring mysteries of human development: what goes wrong at the earliest stages, causing an embryo to die and a pregnancy to fail. To be clear, Niakan will not attempt to implant the embryos in a human; her research is experimental, and the embryos are destroyed seven days after the studies begin.

Like Niakan, June is looking for answers to one of human biology’s more vexing problems: why the immune system, designed to fight disease, is nearly useless against cancer. It’s an issue that’s kept him up at night since 2001, when his wife, not responding to the many treatments she tried, died of ovarian cancer.

“This trial is about two things: safety and feasibility,” he says. It’s about testing whether it’s even possible to successfully edit these immune cells to make them do—in human bodies, not a petri dish—what he wants them to do. Either way, the study will yield critical information, paving the way for eventual new treatment options that are more targeted, less brutal and far smarter against tumors than systemwide chemotherapy will ever be.



As much as has been done in 2016, this is only the beginning of a kind of medicine that stands to effectively change the course of human history. “CRISPR is an empowering technology with broad applications in both basic science and clinical medicine,” says Dr. Francis Collins, director of the NIH. “It will allow us to tackle problems that for a long time we probably felt were out of our reach.”

The Hurdles Ahead

Because it’s so easy to use, Zhang, along with the other CRISPR pioneers, says careful thought should be given to where and how it gets employed. “For the most part I don’t think we are getting ahead of ourselves with the CRISPR applications,” he says. “What we need to do is really engage the public, to make sure people understand what are the really exciting potential applications and what are the immediate limitations of the technology, so we really are applying it and supporting it in the right way.”

Regulatory scrutiny is a given with CRISPR, and any new tool for rewriting human DNA requires federal approval. For the current Penn trial, June got the green light from the NIH Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee, established in the 1980s to assess the safety of any first-in-humans gene-therapy trials. While there are still dangers involved in any kind of gene therapy—the changes may happen in unexpected places, for example, or the edits may have unanticipated side effects—scientists have learned more about the best way to make the genetic changes, and how to deliver them more safely. So far, animal studies show CRISPR provides enough control that unexpected negative effects are rare—at least so far.

The role of regulatory oversight is less clear when the technique is used to alter food crops. Even before June’s patients get infused with CRISPR’d T cells, farmers in Argentina and Minnesota will plant the world’s first gene-edited crops for market. CRISPR provides an unparalleled ability to insert almost any trait into plants—drought or pest resistance, more of this vitamin or less of that nutritional villain du jour. Dupont, for instance, is putting the finishing touches on its first drought-resistant corn, and biotech company Calyxt has created a potato that doesn’t produce cancerous compounds when fried; it’s also planting its first crop of soy plants modified to produce higher amounts of healthy oleic-acid fats.

These edits involve deleting or amping up existing genes—not adding new ones from other species—and the U.S. Department of Agriculture has said this kind of gene-edited food crop is not significantly different from unaltered crops and therefore does not need to be regulated differently.



In the coming months, the National Academy of Sciences is expected to issue guidelines that might address some of the challenges posed by CRISPR, focusing on how and when to proceed with developing new disease treatments. The report is expected to launch much-needed discussion in the scientific community and among the public as well. Whether more regulation will eventually be required likely depends on how far scientists push the limits of their editing—and how comfortable consumers and advocacy groups are with those studies.

As CRISPR goes mainstream in medicine and agriculture, profound moral and ethical questions will arise. Few would argue against using CRISPR to treat terminal cancer patients, but what about treating chronic diseases? Or disabilities? If sickle-cell anemia can be corrected with CRISPR, should obesity, which drives so many life-threatening illnesses? Who decides where that line ought to be drawn?

Questions like these weigh heavily on June and all of CRISPR’s pioneering scientists. “Having this technology enables humans to alter human evolution,” says Doudna. “Thinking about all the different ways it can be employed, both for good and potentially not for very good, I felt it would be irresponsible as someone involved in the earliest stages of the technology not to get out and talk about it.”

Last year, Doudna invited other leaders in genetics to a summit to address the immediate concerns about applying CRISPR to human genes. The group agreed to a voluntary temporary moratorium on using CRISPR to edit the genes of human embryos that would be inserted into a woman and brought to term, since the full array of CRISPR’s consequences isn’t known yet. (Any current research using human embryos, including Niakan’s, is lab-only.)

For researchers like June and Niakan, Doudna and Zhang, and others, proceeding carefully with CRISPR is the only way forward. But proceed they will. The sooner more answers emerge, the sooner CRISPR can mature and begin to deliver on its promise. “There are thousands of applications for CRISPR,” says June. “The sky is the limit. But we have to be careful.”


TIME Inc. The CRISPR Pioneers.

The definitive definitive answer to your question is there in not a definitive answer. Almost to a man (lawyers, professors) thought that there will be no winner take all, and that most likely patents will be split up, all though EDIT/Broad might receive the more lucrative patent (my opinion). Or not. I am hedged with all three companies, but will wait it out until we receive the answer to the billion dollar question. The news will leak out in advance of the final decision, whenever that is, and the stock price will begin to rise on the day of. I was told by the experts that the USPTO will contact council for the two sides (leak #1), and then they will contact their respected clients (leak#2) and then the companies will release a press release (leak#3) either after hours or pre-market. No matter what, one or more of these companies stock price will rise and will continue to do so for years, much like Regeneron (REGN). The same goes if the two sides enter back into settlement talks and the share prices rise for all in advance of the agreement. The safe bet is to buy a token amount of shares in all three just to keep them on your radar. Berkley must prove the "Reasonable Person" legal concept which says the any reasonable person with reasonable skill could have taken the CRISPR concept Berkley applied for and improve upon it, and not one that required extraordinary skills and means that created something that the other side could not and did not do. Confused yet? The panel challenged Berkley over this assertion multiple times and this led many to believe they might be favoring The Broad Institute and Zhang. But who knows. The next step, speculated to be in February, will be either a final decision or to take it to step two, which is the testimonial phase. This will happen if the Judges decide that yesterdays hearing and arguments, along with the 900 pages of documents submitted are not enough to make the final determination on. All I know is I will probably be willing to go all in on the moment a decision is made.