AMRI Licenses CRISPR from the Broad Institute

On August 23, 2016, AMRI announced that it entered into a non-exclusive commercial license agreement with the Broad Institute for the use of CRISPR-Cas9 [Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats-CRISPR associated] gene-editing technology. Under the terms of the commercial license use, AMRI gained access to intellectual property related to CRISPR-Cas9. The financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed. In a press announcement, AMRI says it plans to use the technology for a number of services the company offers including protein production, cell line and assay development, high content screening and analysis, and target validation and assessment.

Intellectual property rights surrounding CRISPR-Cas9 technology has made headlines recently, after a lawsuit ensued between the Broad Institute and the University of California at Berkeley. The debate over who should have rights to patents issued for the technology heated up on August 17, 2016 after an email was released from a former graduate student. STAT News reports that the legal battle between the two institutions is becoming costly. EDITAS Medicine, which licensed a CRISPR patent from the Broad Institute, reports that it has incurred $10.9 million in legal fees from the lawsuit.

Source: AMRI