CRISPR Decision Highlights the Importance of Strategic Claims Drafting

Michael Baker and Kennyn Statler, Consulting Manager, and are co-authors of “CRISPR Decision Highlights the Importance of Strategic Claims Drafting“.

The battle over CRISPR (Clustered regularly-interspaced short palindromic repeats) patents highlights the importance of having a sound patent strategy before filing the first disclosure.  The University of California v. Broad Institute, Inc. is an excellent example of the difference a well-executed strategy can make.  In 2013, teams from UC Berkeley and the Broad Institute filed applications seeking patents for the process of editing genetic information using the CRISPR-Cas9 protein.  This came only months after both parties published scientific articles and filed provisional patents.  Their strategies when filing their patent applications were distinct and the results decisive.