Two Nobel Prize winners just lost a patent fight, and I think that is actually fine.

The ruling that shook biotech but did not break it

On March 26, 2026, the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board reaffirmed that the Broad Institute, MIT, and Harvard were the first to invent the use of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing in eukaryotic cells, the cells that make up every plant, animal, and human body on earth.

That ruling dealt another setback to Jennifer Doudna of UC Berkeley and Emmanuelle Charpentier, the two scientists who won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for co-inventing CRISPR-Cas9 in the first place. The board found that Broad's scientist Feng Zhang had reduced the technology to practice in human cells before the Doudna team could prove they had conceived of the same application.

I remember reading about this patent fight years ago and thinking it would never end. It has now dragged on for over a decade, consumed hundreds of millions in legal fees, and produced a licensing web so tangled that biotech lawyers describe it as "completely insane."

“While this 14-year battle has slowly played out at the PTAB and in the appellate court, there's this completely insane licensing web that's cropped up as labs seek to develop novel therapies using gene editing.”

— Chelsea Loughran, Patent Litigator, Wolf Greenfield

Why the patent outcome matters less than you think

Here is the part everyone skips when they read the headlines. The ruling blocks 14 specific CVC patent applications from moving forward, but it leaves more than 60 U.S. patents and over 40 international patents held by the UC Berkeley coalition completely untouched.

The science itself is not owned by anyone in a way that stops progress. CRISPR-based therapies are already reaching patients. In December 2023, the FDA approved Casgevy, the first CRISPR therapy in history, for sickle cell disease in patients 12 and older.

The clinical trial data for Casgevy is genuinely stunning. In an ongoing trial of 44 sickle cell patients, 93.5% were free of severe pain crises for at least 12 consecutive months. People who expected their lives to end in their 40s are now living without hospitalizations.

That is not a legal outcome. That is a scientific one.

The real problem is cost, not who owns the patent

I do not buy the argument that the Broad Institute winning this patent is a disaster for patients. The Broad has publicly stated it wants CRISPR tools made widely available to the global scientific community. That is a good-faith position, and I think it deserves credit.

The real barrier is not intellectual property. It is price. Casgevy costs roughly $2.2 million per patient. The process takes 8 to 12 months from start to finish, requires high-dose chemotherapy, and demands weeks of hospitalization in sterile conditions. That is a brutal ask for any family, regardless of who holds the patent.

The strongest counterargument here is that patent concentration in the hands of elite institutions like MIT and Harvard will eventually price out universities, nonprofits, and smaller biotech firms from developing next-generation therapies. That concern is legitimate. But the answer is better licensing policy and public funding, not pretending the science belongs to whoever filed first.

What the law got right and what it still gets wrong

The legal standard at the center of this case is actually fascinating. The Federal Circuit ruled in 2025 that the PTAB had been wrong to require inventors to "know their invention would work to prove conception." That is a genuinely important clarification for patent law.

The PTAB reviewed the case again under the corrected standard and still sided with Broad. The board found that Broad's scientists had actually reduced the invention to practice in eukaryotic cells on October 5, 2012, before the Doudna team could prove they had conceived of the same application.

This is where the law is doing its job correctly. Patent priority under the old first-to-invent system is supposed to reward the person who actually built the thing, not just the person who thought of it first. Doudna and Charpentier invented the molecular scissors. Feng Zhang at the Broad was the first to use those scissors inside a human cell. Those are two different inventions, and the law is treating them that way.

What the law still gets wrong is the access side. There is no coherent international framework governing who can license CRISPR for therapeutic use, at what price, and under what conditions. As of today, there are no cohesive, legally binding international rules on gene therapy at all.

The science is outrunning the legal system and that is a good thing

While lawyers argued over conception dates, scientists kept building. In early 2025, a team including researchers from the Innovative Genomics Institute delivered the first personalized CRISPR therapy to an infant, developed and administered in just six months.

Going from a lab discovery to an approved medicine in 11 years is remarkable by any standard. The patent fight consumed enormous resources and created real uncertainty for biotech developers. But it did not stop the science.

Would you trust a legal system that moves this slowly to govern a technology that moves this fast? Because that is the real question lawmakers need to answer before the next generation of gene therapies arrives.