> I guess to be rewarded in science you have to be a master in your field and intensely concerned with IP deadlines.
Dr. Zhang and MIT proved that the Crispr technique would work in plant, animal and human cells. The value of the patents is in that research, not Doudna's in vitro proof.
Doudna took Cripsr from an odd genomic pattern to proof of Cripr/Cas9 being a bacterial immunity complex complete with proof of mechanism.
Transferring that body of work over to in-vivo is trivial in comparison to what she did. Transferring genes from one organism to another is run of the mill molecular biology.
Transferring that body of work over to in-vivo is trivial in comparison to what she did. Transferring genes from one organism to another is run of the mill molecular biology.
This tech has been around for years. Monsanto wouldn't exist without molecular biology. We'd still be extracting insulin out of farm animals if molecular biology hadn't allowed scientists to grow it in yeast.
You're mistaking traditional cell bio libraries with CRISPR, crispr takes a two year process and makes it two weeks. It's really quite a significant change.
The tech is really not the same, it's the difference between hand braided core-ram and re programmable memory. It's a huge difference.
The process of putting the CRISPR genes in a cell and making them target a given gene is trivially simple and undergraduates around the world are doing it every hour (if not more). The Broad group did a little more than that, but it's nothing compared to UC's group's pioneering effort, and amounts mostly to breaking a certain part of the functionality and doing some very standard tests.
The tool is extremely effective, as you say, and was primarily "designed" via natural selection. The researchers (1) discovered it, teased out its mechanism of action, and its programmability, and (2) did standard molecular bio techniques to show that it works across several oragnisms.
This ruling is based on the fact that the original inventors didn't throw the genes into cells, publish, and (most importantly) apply for patents before the Broad group did. Whether it would work in those other cells was a crapshoot and doesn't represent any significant creative work, and a minor work of science. The importance is the result - we know it works in those cells.
Source: I also work in this field. This ruling is absurd.
Doudna definitely deserves all the credit for clarifying the mechanism and modifying the system for sgRNA instead of the original two RNAs.
But what Zhang did was not trivial. He did not just take Doudna's system and threw it into a mammalian system. He modified the system so: 1) codon optimized (not very hard, I know). 2) Added two localization signal sequences so it goes into the nucleus. 3) And most importantly, he modified the system (nuclease to nickase) so mismatch repair (homology based repair) occurs more frequently than non-homologous end joining. These modifications are not trivial and probably took a lot of trial and error.
Just because crispr is so simple to perform now doesn't mean there wasn't a lot of effort on both Doudna and Zhang's part.
Personally, I believe both of them should have been on the patent. For me, Doudna came up with the Ford model T and Zhang iterated and extended it into a Ferrari.
> Transferring that body of work over to in-vivo is trivial in comparison to what she did.
If this was the case then she would have won the patent fight. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board thought otherwise. Did you read their 51-page decision?
Dr. Zhang and MIT proved that the Crispr technique would work in plant, animal and human cells. The value of the patents is in that research, not Doudna's in vitro proof.