Crown Bioscience inked a licensing deal with ERS Genomics to use its CRISPR/Cas9 patent portfolio for gene editing in the development of new treatments in the fields of oncology, immuno-oncology and immune-mediated inflammatory diseases.
The agreement helps Crown Bioscience expand its gene editing capabilities and further develop gene editing in 3D patient-derived tumor organoid models, it said in a Dec. 8 press release. The deal also puts the company, which is a preclinical services firm owned by JSR Life Sciences, in a position of being licensed by “all appropriate patent holders” and able to offer commercial services globally using the technology.
Financial terms of the agreement weren’t disclosed.
“Expanding our current offering provides more innovative drug discovery solutions for our customers,” Mike Prosser, Crown Bioscience’s chief business officer, said in the release. “We see tremendous potential for using CRISPR gene editing to enhance and manipulate cells and potentially patient derived organoids in both 2D and 3D.”
CRISPR gene editing technology has been the center of a long-running patent dispute.
ERS currently holds an exclusive worldwide license for the technology developed by co-founder and 2020 Nobel Prize winner Emmanuelle Charpentier, Ph.D, for the foundational intellectual property covering CRISPR/Cas9 for use as a research platform.
In April, Charpentier, the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Vienna appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to review a decision from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which ruled in favor of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Then, in September, Science reported the Patent Trial and Appeal Board ruled that a group led by the Broad Institute had "priority" in its already granted patents for uses of the original CRISPR system in eukaryotic cells. However, the ruling also gave the “UC group” that includes the University of Vienna and Charpentier firmer ground for one critical component of the technology.