On March 26, 2026, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) again ruled that the Broad Institute, MIT, and Harvard — not the University of California, Berkeley’s CVC group — were first to invent the use of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing in eukaryotic cells. It is the latest, and likely not the last, ruling in a patent-priority dispute that has run for more than a decade and shapes who controls licensing terms for one of biotechnology’s foundational gene-editing platforms. This page summarizes what the PTAB actually decided, what it leaves unresolved, and what it means for institutions negotiating CRISPR licenses.
Background: a decade-long priority fight, not a single lawsuit
The dispute is formally a patent interference proceeding at the USPTO, not ordinary civil litigation — interference practice exists specifically to determine which of two or more parties who filed overlapping patent claims actually invented the claimed subject matter first. Two research groups independently filed patent applications covering CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing in the years following the technology’s initial description: a team led by Jennifer Doudna (UC Berkeley) and Emmanuelle Charpentier (then at the University of Vienna), collectively referred to in USPTO proceedings as CVC; and a team at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard led by Feng Zhang. Both groups sought patent rights covering CRISPR-Cas9 use in eukaryotic cells — plant, fungal, and animal cells, including human cells — the application space with the most direct relevance to human therapeutics, agricultural biotech, and most commercial CRISPR licensing.
The PTAB first ruled in Broad’s favor on this specific priority question in 2017, again in a related decision in 2022, and the matter has been appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) more than once since. The Federal Circuit remanded the case back to the PTAB for further analysis, and the March 2026 decision is the PTAB’s ruling on that remand — reaffirming, not originating, Broad’s priority position. CASRAI does not yet have a dedicated page tracing the full interference history prior to this ruling; the closest existing coverage on this site addresses adjacent but distinct questions — the legal status of germline gene editing itself (see CRISPR Germline Editing Legal Status by Country) and the bioethics/oversight side of CRISPR research (see CRISPR Ethics: Germline Editing, He Jiankui, and Oversight) — not the patent-ownership dispute covered here.
What the PTAB actually decided in March 2026
On the merits, the Board found that CVC had not met its burden, as the junior party in the interference, to show that its inventors conceived of a working embodiment of the contested claim (a functional CRISPR-Cas9 system operating in a eukaryotic cell) before Broad’s actual reduction to practice, which the Board dated to October 5, 2012. In the Board’s analysis, a person of ordinary skill in the art could not have taken CVC’s earlier disclosures and arrived at an operable eukaryotic CRISPR-Cas9 system without what the Board characterized as extensive further research and unpredictable experimentation — meaning CVC’s earlier filings did not, in patent-law terms, adequately support a priority claim to the specific eukaryotic-cell embodiment at issue.
Practically, UC Berkeley confirmed the ruling prevents 14 CVC patent applications from moving to allowance on the contested eukaryotic-cell claims. Broad’s own patents covering CRISPR-Cas9 use in eukaryotic cells — the foundation of its exclusive licensing arrangements with companies developing human therapeutics and other eukaryotic-cell applications — remain intact.
What this ruling does not change
The March 2026 decision is narrower than headlines suggest. It resolves priority for one specific claim scope — CRISPR-Cas9 use in eukaryotic cells — within one interference proceeding. It does not touch CVC’s broader patent estate: UC Berkeley has stated that more than 60 U.S. patents and more than 40 non-U.S. patents already granted to CVC, covering CRISPR-Cas9 compositions and methods across all cell types (including human cells), are unaffected by this ruling. CVC continues to hold and license patent rights outside the specific eukaryotic-cell priority claims the PTAB adjudicated here. Separately, related interference proceedings involving other CRISPR patent claimants — including ToolGen and Sigma-Aldrich — remain paused and were not resolved by this decision.
Practical implications for CRISPR licensing and tech transfer
For institutions and companies negotiating rights to use CRISPR-Cas9 in human, animal, plant, or fungal cell applications — the great majority of commercial CRISPR therapeutics, diagnostics, and agricultural biotech work — this decision reinforces Broad’s existing licensing leverage on eukaryotic-cell claims specifically, rather than establishing new leverage. Broad and its licensing partners (Editas Medicine, and others operating under Broad-derived rights) can continue to point to Board-affirmed priority on the eukaryotic-cell claim set. At the same time, because CVC’s separate, unaffected patent estate covers CRISPR-Cas9 compositions and methods broadly, a party seeking freedom to operate for a eukaryotic-cell CRISPR application may still need rights from CVC-side patents depending on the specific claims at issue — this ruling narrows one party’s priority claim, it does not clear the field of competing rights entirely. Institutional tech transfer offices and licensing counsel evaluating a CRISPR-based product or research tool should treat this as confirmation that the underlying interference dispute is still active and claim-specific, not as a signal that the broader CRISPR intellectual-property landscape has been finally settled. See CASRAI’s general background on freedom-to-operate analysis and exclusive licensing for the underlying tech-transfer concepts this kind of priority dispute affects.
Next steps: is this final?
No. This is a Board-level administrative decision, not a final court judgment, and it already followed one prior remand from the Federal Circuit. UC Berkeley’s public statement following the ruling described the university as “disappointed” by the decision; public reporting reviewed for this page had not, at the time of writing, identified a formal, confirmed notice of appeal from UC Berkeley or CVC. CVC’s available options mirror the path the case has already taken once: appeal the PTAB’s decision to the Federal Circuit, and — in principle, though costly and rarely successful for a case at this stage — seek further review from the U.S. Supreme Court. Given the case’s history of remand and reaffirmation, institutions relying on either side’s patent position for licensing decisions should treat the underlying priority question as still subject to further appellate review, not conclusively closed by this ruling.
Related CASRAI coverage
- Bayh-Dole March-In Rights: What They Mean for University Tech Transfer
- 37 CFR 401: Bayh-Dole Implementing Regulations Explained
- CRISPR Germline Editing Legal Status by Country (US, UK, China)
- CRISPR Ethics: Germline Editing, He Jiankui, and Oversight
- Technology Transfer & Innovation
Sources consulted: Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu, March 26, 2026); IPWatchdog; Akin Gump IP Newsflash; Wilson Sonsini; Knobbe Martens; Science/AAAS. This page reflects public reporting available at the time of writing and will be updated if the parties’ next procedural steps are confirmed.
