Crispr: Nobel prize for gene-editing technique at risk over patent dispute

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/crispr-scientists-hopes-to-win-nobel-prize-for-gene-editing-technique-at-risk-over-patent-dispute-a6677436.html

by mudil • 11 years ago

50 26 11 years ago

independent.co.uk

mudil2• 11 years ago

An editorial in Nature recently described CRISPR as "the biggest game changer to hit biology since PCR." [polymerase chain reaction]. PCR is used everywhere: from forensics DNA analysis to pathology tests. CRISPR in the near future might be used to "fix" genes in a variety of conditions: from Duchenne muscular dystrophy to cancer. Really, it's that big!

http://www.nature.com/news/crispr-the-disruptor-1.17673

lvs• 11 years ago

The hype is just out of control on this. It's a new tool in the lab that is of some use, but none of these other fantastical claims are anywhere near the real world, and they may never be. This method suffers the same risks as viral therapies that have also been very difficult to bring to real patients.

mudil2• 11 years ago

Maybe. Maybe not. Viral therapies suffer from one problem: viruses. (They might be infectious, or not. They might be attacked by the immune system or not.) CRISPR technique does not need an external vector.

pcrh2• 11 years ago

Modern gene editing is not a paradigm shift, but rather a technical innovation, and one that will surely bear fruit, at least at the level of substantially increasing the rate at which biological research and bio-industry processes can advance.

Crispr, and the newly identified similar process using Cpf1, allow one to perform gene editing at a rate and on a scale not previously feasible.

Whether it will eventually have benefits in medicine remains to be seen. Previous technological breakthroughs in genetic modification, such as adenovirus-mediated gene therapy, RNAi, etc, have had limited impact. I believe the best effects have occurred in the fields of several narrowly defined leukemias. In these cases the entire cell population is under constant renewal, so introducing an engineered line of blood cells and removing the malignant one has been technically possible since the invention of bone marrow transplants. Doing so for other cell types or organs is much more difficult.

jamessb• 11 years ago

"the committee is notorious for two things; its obsessive secrecy and an institutional aversion to controversy"

The committee is certainly secretive, but as this makes it difficult to see exactly what candidates were considered and how decisions were made, it is hard to tell whether the committee has actively tried to avoid controversy.

Regardless of the committee's intent, its decisions have been the subject of many controversies: see the long list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies

dekhn• 11 years ago

Agreed. The committee specifically awarded Prusiner (solely) the prize for the discovery of prions, because the committee for medical prizes (which turns out to be a bunch of structural biologists) was 100% convinced he was right, and they specifically told him that they were awarding him the prize to give him money to continue his research, because they knew his funding had been denied. (Memories of Madness, Prusiner).

hliyan• 11 years ago

Seems like there's a question whether the patent should have been awarded in the first place:

   It is not possible to patent a natural process, and both Crispr
   and Cas9 are natural, at least in bacteria. Putting both together
   and showing how the molecular complex can be used in mammalian
   cells was the key “inventive step” that the Broad Institute 
   believes swayed the US patent office – but not before the 
   institute instigated a “fast track” patent application to the 
   chagrin of Berkeley’s patent lawyers.

coldcode• 11 years ago

To me this is no different than patenting combining anything with a computer like booking hotels on a computer or reading news with a computer. I also still think that combining two things that themselves are not patentable should not be patentable. When it comes to discoveries in a university setting none of the work should ever be patentable at all.

IIAOPSW• 11 years ago

Up to 3 people and two different works can share a Nobel prize. Seems to me there's an obvious way out of this mess. At least from the Nobel committees pov.

greydius• 11 years ago

I don't understand what patents have to do with it. The prize is for scientific discovery, not practical use of said discoveries (i.e. inventions). I mean that's sort of the point, right? Inventions already have a financial incentive: profit from selling/licensing.

T-A• 11 years ago

Big money is (or is believed to be) on the line, so being seen as taking sides in the food fight over patents would inevitably cause the "slighted" party to be less than pleased with

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/prize_award...

in particular and with Swedish academia in general. Displeasing either the University of California or MIT is not an attractive use of the disproportionately powerful tool for making friends and influencing people which Alfred Nobel unwittingly deposited in the lap of tiny Sweden's academia.

IIAOPSW's suggestion below (shared prize for Zhang, Charpentier and Doudna) would be a typically Swedish compromise. But they could also just wait, at the modest cost of being seen as less timely.

acomjean• 11 years ago

"Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues found that they could replace the Cas9 enzyme that has proved so good at snipping the DNA of genes with another bacterial enzyme called Cpf1. "

They'll be more alternatives soon , making tis whole patent thing moot (hopefully).

One wonders if NIH money was involved in this, and if it was shouldn't everyone get to use it?

Off target effects are still a problem with this technique.

jjoonathan• 11 years ago

if NIH money was involved in this, shouldn't everyone get to use it?

In principle, yes, but the Bayh-Dole act gives away any government stake in IP rights.

Some people see Bayh-Dole as an obviously corrupt and terrible idea. Those people typically haven't gone through the struggle of trying to justify the value proposition (or lack thereof) in an academic career. We (the US) are getting worse and worse at funding academia and this is one of the creative alternative "funding" sources used to prop up the increasingly shaky system (another important one: green cards). I suspect that if you asked most people involved in day-to-day research they'd rather take extra cash in exchange for letting the government keep some of the IP, but they aren't the ones who get to choose.

Amorymeltzer• 11 years ago

Is this the kind of thing that the America Invent Act of 2011 made worse? I've long felt that moving to a FItF system opens the door to disputes like this, or at least exacerbates already-existing and potentially confusing timeline disputes.

gmisra• 11 years ago

This article from last week suggests that the patent may not be that important. A team has recently discovered a second protein that can be used to power the crispr process, and they believe that more such proteins may exist [1].

...but patenting proteins still feels ridiculous. This is information that all of humanity has, basically, equal access to. Finding something in this pile "first" and planting a flag in the ground seems like a pretty terrible way to share knowledge. There is a somewhat forced analogy here between genetic exploration and global exploration in the colonial period, but I think most historians would agree that the "I got here first" model of "rights" ended up exacerbating existing gaps between haves and have-nots.

[1] http://www.wired.com/2015/09/war-genome-editing-just-got-lot...

JoeAltmaier• 11 years ago

I'm not sure proteins have to be 'found'. They can be invented. Then they are a lot more like a copyright and not a patent.

88e282102ae2e5b• 11 years ago

You could then still have the distinction between synthetic proteins and natural ones, and only permit patents on the synthetic ones.

bane• 11 years ago

The fun question is, if somebody invents one, and it's found in nature later, is that sufficient prior art to invalidate the patent?

natrius2• 11 years ago

Intellectual property is a local maximum as far as progress goes. It's clear that society should reward all three of these researchers for their work, but our laws and our currency don't allow this.

Currency might seem like a tangent, but it's not. Currency is what we use to decide who to reward. It signifies a debt owed to you by society. When someone sells you goods or services or provides their labor to you as an employee, they're rewarding you for work that you've done in the past.

It sounds like society should reward all three of these researchers. They should be able to walk into a grocery store (or a Tesla dealership) and say, "Hey, I helped invent a way to edit genes in living cells. Can you reward me for that?" We want the answer to be yes, but we also don't want Tesla and the other people who make things the researchers want to be on the hook for the rewards themselves. The obligation should flow through society like money. Tesla should be able to say, "Hey, we made an awesome car for someone who invented a way to edit genes in living cells. Can you reward us for that by giving us supplies or labor?"

Not everyone will want to reward the CRISPR folks, but there's a pretty straightforward response to that: don't reward the people who don't reward the CRISPR folks. It might sound unwieldy to have to keep track of this information when you're trying to trade with people, but that's why we make software. You'll pick an app that implements the reward policies you prefer, then you won't have to think about it on an ongoing basis.

This is merit capitalism. It requires a common historical record of who has done what for whom, which we can now build thanks to blockchains. Intellectual property is a better tool than nothing, but we're getting fewer of the inventions, discoveries and works of art than we could be getting because it's such a cumbersome tool for incentivizing progress. Let's try something else.

http://meritcapitalism.com/

nickff• 11 years ago

Does this proposal not suffer from the economic calculation problem?[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem

natrius2• 11 years ago

Good question. It does, but public goods always have this problem. We currently address the problem by granting temporary monopolies on intellectual property so prices can be established for it. This is replacing one market failure with another.

Think about it this way: when humans invent new ways to live healthier lives, we limit the access to these inventions for at least 20 years. Isn't that crazy? Everyone could be living with the benefits of those ideas twenty years earlier, but in order to incentivize the creation of those ideas, we explicitly delay progress.

Instead, we could just pay for intellectual property as a society. This introduces a new problem of deciding the price to pay, which is what merit capitalism solves. An individual picks her own price, then decides how much others have to pay to remain part of her society of people she rewards. That is, if you don't pay her minimum contribution, then she won't do work for you or sell you products, nor will she work for people whose justification for their reward is that they've rewarded you in the past. Your rewards are cut out of her economy, which makes rewarding you less valuable for every other human. There's one less place for other humans to go to get rewarded for rewarding you.

Does this lead to the optimal price of public goods? There's no proof that it does, but I don't think such a proof is possible. Intellectual property leads to the price that monopoly power achieves, which clearly isn't an optimal price. In merit capitalism, society will iterate until their prices achieve a level of progress they collectively find desirable.

Crispr: Nobel prize for gene-editing technique at risk over patent dispute

Related Stories