Jason Ukman
Managing editor
STAT
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A new battle is brewing among biotechs over next-gen gene-editing tools |
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Paywall login credentials: www.statnews.com/login Username: contest@statnews.com Password: stat123 Over the last decade, there’s been extensive reporting on a high-profile patent fight over who controls the rights to a powerful genome editing technology called CRISPR. In this story, STAT reported on a new, previously unreported fight quietly brewing between top labs and billion-dollar companies over a new generation of editing technologies that could be even more important for medicine — and even more lucrative. Our reporting blended a detailed understanding of the incredibly complex biology underlying these inventions with a nuanced grasp of the dense intellectual property laws that govern what constitutes a patentable invention in biotechnology and how a new company might be able to copy that invention but still get away with it. We spoke to dozens of experts, investors, and executives and acquired confidential materials detailing what various companies were telling investors. The result is a piece that suggests several high-profile biotech startups might have copied a Harvard scientist’s breakthrough, but that, legally, it might not matter. The piece suggests we may have entered a new era for private scientific enterprise, where some biological tools are so complex, with so many moving parts, they can’t be easily protected by patents — a world where it’s far less important who owns an invention than it is who can turn it into a powerful medicine. |
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