
Scientists Battle in Court Over Lucrative Patents for Gene-Editing Tool - gloriousduke
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/12/05/504454201/scientists-battle-in-court-over-lucrative-patents-for-gene-editing-tool
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dekhn
Everybody was really excited about CRISPR for a while. The excitement has died
down. Why?

More people came to understsand that CRISPR is just a useful tool, another one
we've borrowed from the wonderful bacteria. Like restriction endonucleases,
the new tech transforms how we do many processes in the lab, and probably also
in the hospital.

However, that's all it is. A tool. A tool that makes what was really hard
slightly easier. Modifying the DNA of a genome in place was _always_ the easy
part. Biology does that all the time (viruses, lambda switch, yeast mating
types, etc).

Figuring out what to change the DNA to, ensuring the modification is 100%
accurate, in the right place, and no off-target effects, those are all harder
problems. Biology requires thousands to millions of years to improve on
phenotypes, and we're just now starting to realize how hard it is to change
one part of the genome without adjusting for that change in a million other
locations.

And CRISPR/cas9- the tech being argued over. It's not even that useful. It's
blunt-end joining, newer techniques with fewer off target effects using
overlap joining are being worked out. cas9 might be obsolete before anybody
even gets a Nobel Prize for it!

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88e282102ae2e5b
I'm not sure how you're measuring excitement, but I wouldn't say it's died
down. The entire field is only four years old, after all. This really isn't
enough time for a technology to mature.

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up2016
From overhype to underestimating like in this post..a result of missing
knowledge about CRISPR or molecular biology at all

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anonymfus
Applying existing technology in a novel way should not be patentable.

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88e282102ae2e5b
Not mentioned in this article is Cpf1, another CRISPR enzyme which is
unambiguously owned by the Broad Institute and may have less off-target
activity compared to Cas9. It could easily be that this entire disagreement is
over nothing.

