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The Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., will retain potentially lucrative rights to a powerful gene-editing technique that could lead to major advances in medicine and agriculture, the federal Patent and Trademark Office ruled on Wednesday. The decision, in a bitterly fought dispute closely watched by scientists and the biotechnology industry, was a blow to the University of California, often said to be the birthplace of the technique, which is known as Crispr-Cas9. (Pollack, 2/15)

UC Berkeley biochemist Jennifer Doudna and her European collaborator, Emmanuelle Charpentier, have racked up a slew of awards for their work, which makes it very easy to alter the DNA of living things. But their efforts to patent their discovery have been hung up by a competing claim from Feng Zhang at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. (Netburn, 2/15)

The CRISPR patent fight appears to be over, at least for the moment. A ruling by the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board found no “interference” in patents awarded to Feng Zhang at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. The loser, pending appeals, is the University of California, and the much-heralded biochemist  Jennifer Doudna, who, along with Emmanuelle Charpentier, in 2012 published a groundbreaking paper showing how to exploit a natural bacterial gene-editing system known as CRISPR. The patent office determined that Zhang's later innovations, which used CRISPR to edit mammalian cells, were not simply elaborations of what Doudna and Charpentier had already discovered. (Achenbach and Johnson, 2/15)

The proceedings aren't entirely settled, but as Sherkow sees the situation, the Broad Institute — a joint venture of Harvard University and MIT — will hold the patent for using CRISPR in human beings, other animals, and plants. Sherkow told Shots he believes Cal's patent, which has not yet been issued, could be limited to bacteria. (Harris, 2/15)

The financial implications are huge, since CRISPR may lead to many lucrative products in medicine, agriculture and elsewhere. One company that has licensed Broad’s technology, Editas Medicine Inc., saw its shares jump by 29 percent Wednesday. (Ritter, 2/15)

In a brief order, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office sided with Broad, ruling there is “no interference in fact” — meaning that the universities’ discoveries accomplish different things. The ruling neither cancels nor refuses either parties’ claims, but leaves in place patents previously issued to the Broad Institute. (Krieger, 2/15)

“As the legal dispute moves forward, my team will continue to focus on using CRISPR to deliver advances and solutions that can help solve our greatest challenges across human health, agriculture and the environment,” said Doudna, in a statement Wednesday. (Perlman, 2/15)