Who owns CRISPR?
It has – and continues to be – one of the biggest intellectual property debates in the history of science. But to Berkeley Professor Michael Eisen, the field is posing the wrong question. On Thursday, at the Future of Genomic Medicine Conference in San Diego, California, Eisen asked:
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Why does anybody own CRISPR?
His point: Intellectual property in academia is a drain on the system. It’s a model that was ushered in decades ago with an aim to encourage innovation. Instead, it stifles the academic process with licensing costs and intellectual secrecy. The incentives it creates, Eisen argued, run counter to the pursuit of knowledge.
One of the core problems is that the licensing fees hit early-stage research and development — the point of use, not the end product. The economic costs then reverberate throughout the industry.
“They’re a tax on use by the industry, a tax that goes directly to the university,” Eisen told the audience. “Those taxes are almost a perfect example of where you’re introducing friction into a system.”
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The model traces back to the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, he said. Prior to this, the federal government owned discoveries made through the research it funded.
The problem was that the government wasn’t good at commercializing and using those inventions. With the Bayh-Dole Act, ownership rights were transferred to the institutions in the hope that it would encourage innovation and the practical use of scientific breakthroughs.
Eisen believes the opposite has happened. Incentivized by money, institutions have become competitive and protective of scientific advances.
CRISPR is a timely example. While the owner of the ultimate ‘ah-ha’ moment is up for debate, most agree it was the product of many incremental advances by scientists around the world.
“If CRISPR had just been discovered in labs and they had just published it and nobody had patented, I think everybody would be using it,” Eisen said.
Instead, he believes people are scared to adopt this new tool because of the IP disputes.
“I’ve seen many examples, both in companies I’m associated with and other people, of people who could make use of CRISPR in very big and important ways, but are doing other things that are slower, more expensive, less efficient, because they are terrified of the uncertainty that comes with the current state of the intellectual property,” he said.
The University of California, Berkeley and the Broad Institute have been contesting ownership of CRISPR. A ruling in February determined that both have distinct claims to aspects of the gene editing technique.
But it’s an institutional spat. The two scientists behind the invention, Feng Zhang and Jennifer Doudna, cofounded a company together in 2013 — Editas Medicine. In 2014, Zhang told Bio-IT World that he felt it was important to keep the technology open to the wider scientific field.
On the other hand, the money raised by academic institutions is theoretically going to a good cause. In a follow-up phone call, Eisen said his own department has been able to hire new academic fellows based on licensing profits.
However, he rejects the idea that it is a critical part of funding academia. A 2013 Brookings Institute study found that, by the time the tech transfer administration and legal costs are paid, seven out of eight internal patent offices don’t make enough to cover their own operating costs.
“Every institution thinks that they’re just one paper away from a huge discovery that’s going to pay for the football team or something,” he laughed.
There would be a gap in funding for the minority of institutions that do make a substantial profit from licensing their IP. Eisen said this would need to be factored into any system changes, but in the long run, science would be accelerated and made more efficient if the IP barriers were removed.
And it’s not just granted or disputed patents that slow down the process. Universities invest heavily in protecting scientific work with the hope that it may someday generate licensing revenue. For the scientists in the lab, Eisen said it’s a logistical burden.
“Literally every exchange; exchange of a reagent, exchange of a method, is governed by this insane array of material transfer agreements,” he said. “I can’t get someone to send me a fly from Stanford to Berkeley without having lawyers involved.”
It can also send the wrong message to institutions and scientists. Translational medicine is viewed as more lucrative, with a greater likelihood of generating profitable IP. That comes at the expense of the basic research needed to propel the field forward.
“You naturally reprioritize the kind of research people will do.”
Per Isaac Newton’s famous quote, science is about “standing upon the shoulders of giants.” It is incremental and collaborative. Then an arbitrary line is drawn when something is deemed patentable. Institutions get involved and restrictions are placed on that tool or technology.
Whether Eisen is correct or not, the overarching idea is is that we haven’t been interrogating the current model to determine whether or not it works. There is very little data and, as a result, very little debate.
Thankfully, Eisen is just getting started.
Photo: HYWARDS, Getty Images
