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U.S. appeals court judges appear divided over whether to allow a research center affiliated with MIT and Harvard to keep patents potentially worth billions of dollars on a groundbreaking gene editing technology known as CRISPR. Patents on the technology that could revolutionize treatment of genetic diseases and crop engineering are held by the Broad Institute, which was challenged in court by a rival team associated with the University of California at Berkeley and University of Vienna in Austria. Their lawyers argued at a hearing on Monday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington that the Broad Institute’s contributions were obvious and that an administrative court decision allowing Broad’s patents to stand should be reversed. (Wolfe, 4/30)

The university clearly failed to win over at least one of the three judges and, at best, did not lose too much ground with a second (while the third asked almost no questions and so did not tip his hand). “UC came into this argument from a tough spot, and I doubt that oral arguments from either side moved the needle much,” said patent attorney Michael Stramiello of Paul Hastings, who attended the arguments at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, where attorneys for the University of California fought to get a patent win by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard reversed. (Begley, 4/30)