The CRISPR patent fight between Berkeley and the Broad Institute lasted a decade

In 2012, Jennifer Doudna (UC Berkeley) and Emmanuelle Charpentier (then at Umeå University) published the foundational paper describing CRISPR-Cas9 as a gene-editing tool. In December 2012, Feng Zhang (Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard) filed a patent application for CRISPR-Cas9 use in eukaryotic cells, which was granted in 2014 under an accelerated review process.

UC Berkeley challenged the patent, arguing that Doudna and Charpentier's earlier publication constituted prior art. The dispute became one of the most consequential patent battles in biotechnology history, with billions of dollars in licensing revenue at stake. The US Patent Office initially ruled in Zhang's favor, but the legal battle continued through multiple appeals.

In 2020, Doudna and Charpentier were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of CRISPR, while Zhang was not included. The patent dispute was eventually settled with both institutions sharing licensing rights. The case illustrated how the patent system's 'first to file' rule can conflict with the scientific community's 'first to publish' norm, and how the race to patent can overshadow the science itself.