Intellia to win China patent for CRISPR

20 June 2017 | News

Intellia holds rights to CRISPR intellectual property through a 2014 license agreement with Caribou Biosciences, the exclusive licensee of the University of California and University of Vienna.

Intellia Therapeutics has received notice from China’s State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) that it will grant the company a broad patent covering CRISPR/Cas9 single-guide gene-editing methods and compositions.

The CRISPR patent to be issued by SIPO includes claims covering methods for editing DNA in noncellular and cellular settings, including in eukaryotic cells such as human and mammalian cells.

Also included in the patent are CRISPR/Cas9 composition of matter and system claims for use in any setting, including claims covering the use of CRISPR/Cas9 in producing medicines for treating disease.

Intellia holds rights to CRISPR intellectual property developed by the Regents of the University of California (UC), the University of Vienna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier, Ph.D., a director at the Max-Planck Institute in Berlin, through a 2014 license agreement with Caribou Biosciences, the exclusive licensee of the UC and University of Vienna. Those rights include human therapeutic, prophylactic, and palliative uses (including companion diagnostics), excluding antifungal and antimicrobial applications.

China’s plans to grant a patent for CRISPR come less than a year after the nation has seen two clinical trials involving the technology. In October 2016, You Lu, M.D., and colleagues at Sichuan University’s West China Hospital in Chengdu launched the world’s first CRISPR trial in humans by using the technology to knock out a gene encoding the programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) in patients with non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

The second trial was initiated in April 2017 in patients with late-stage nasopharyngeal carcinoma, by researchers led by Jia Wei, M.D., Ph.D., vice director of the Clinical Cancer Institute of Nanjing University. The first U.S. trial is expected to be started later this year by a team led by Carl June, M.D. of the University of Pennsylvania.

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