Innovation Insights: What’s going on with CRISPR?
by: Chris Mulkey, COO / Head of Research
CRISPR Title Match
It’s been roughly 7 years since the litigation over the rights to CRISPR technology began between the University of California at Berkeley and the Broad Institute. Despite the feud, there’s been plenty of activity with the groundbreaking genomic-editing tech. So, what’s been going on in the IP world with CRISPR since then?
Not surprisingly, the two parties above have been very active in the patent space since. But the CRISPR trajectory appears to have transcended the courts and forged ahead nevertheless. Is the technology thriving? Are new players in the space expounding upon the tech described in the initial patent filings of the two major players above?
With rudimentary analytics, some basic trends are relatively easy to discern by looking at the number of filings mentioning CRISPR, and as expected, these trends point upward. However, given the number of continuations/CIPs/etc, the true picture of progress might be skewed by the volume of any given player filing for patents on variations of the same basic application of CRISPR.
For the purposes of my analysis, I wanted to see whether there’s some assumed NEW expansion of the technology itself. Of course, reading through the filings and comparing/contrasting would be a bit above my pay grade, so I turn to the raw patent data.
Therefore, I looked at the number of new filings per year, normalized against extended INPADOC families. In other words, I want to evaluate the volume of applications representing entirely new extended patent families, rather than merely seeing the number of “add-ons” to existing families, which can get quite large, as those in our industry know, and this is especially true with CRISPR when the applications in biology and genetics are nearly boundless.
In our experience, when a brand new technology (not debating the history of CRISPR here) arises, there tends to be an explosion of filings.
Over time, new filings (which end up granted) ultimately taper off until the technology is so saturated with patent protection that volume of grants drops sharply. It appears, however, that CRISPR is living up to the hype with continued acceleration in filings to date. And the below numbers are UNIQUE filings/disclosures, at least by the INPADOC Extended Family standard. (The definition of an extended family, in relevant part, is: “Members of an extended patent family will have at least one priority in common with at least one other member - either directly or indirectly” – this expands the typical family relationship beyond direct association with a parent provisional (see here for full Extended family definition).
CRISPR Patent Family Growth
So, based on new extended families over the last ~7 years, here’s what’s happening:
2012 – 2013 – 4 new extended families
2013 – 2014 – 74 new extended families
2014 – 2015 – 134 new extended families
2015 – 2016 – 220 new extended families
2016 – 2017 – 365 new extended families
2017 – 2018 – 449 new extended families
2018 – 2019 – 514 new extended families
*262 new extended families are indicated in 2019, though this number is the most strongly skewed by heretofore unpublished apps, and therefore mostly ignored here.
One doesn’t need a pretty graph to see the progression, and it’s worth noting that the volume for the later years will likely increase further as the remainder of unpublished apps finally publish.
What we’re seeing here is very healthy acceleration, because the uptick in volume doesn’t just mean more filings generally, it represents an actual expansion of the original technology over and above the Broad Institute and UC-Berkeley’s seminal filings.
CRISPR is here to stay folks. It’s bounded by our imagination alone. And the craziest part? Its components were here all along, just waiting to be put to task in novel (and non-obvious) ways.
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