Merck Secures Seven Additional CRISPR Patents, Bringing Global Total to 20

Darmstadt, Germany, August 19, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Leading technology companyMerck(Merck) Announced today that the intellectual property offices of Europe, Israel, South Korea, and the United Kingdom have issued official notices supporting the company’s additional seven patent application claims covering CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) gene-editing technology, bringing Merck’s global total of CRISPR patents to 20.

Wu Boda, Member of the Executive Board of Merck KGaA and CEO of the Life Science Business SectorUdit Batra) stated: “It is truly inspiring to see this important scientific work recognized through these latest CRISPR patents. We are ambitious about continuing to expand our CRISPR intellectual property portfolio with technologies such as paired Cas9 nickases, which can be used to reduce off-target effects, and proxy-CRISPR, which provides researchers with additional experimental options to accelerate drug development and create new therapies.”

The details of the latest CRISPR patent obtained by Merck are as follows:

In addition to Europe, Israel, the United Kingdom, and South Korea, Merck holds CRISPR-related patents in the following regions: the United States, Canada, Australia, China, and Singapore. The company obtained its first foundational patent covering CRISPR integration in Australia in 2017, and secured its first CRISPR patent related to proxy-CRISPR in the United States in 2019.

Earlier, Merck announced that in 2017 it wouldEuropeObtained different CRISPR patents, and in 2018 atSouth Korea and IsraelObtained CRISPR Patent.

On July 18, 2019, Merck announcedwith the MIT-Harvard Broad Institute (Broad Institute ofMIT and Harvard) reached a CRISPR licensing frameworkto provide non-exclusive licenses for CRISPR intellectual property used in commercial research and product development, within the respective spheres of control of both parties. This new framework is designed to help streamline and accelerate the process by which the scientific community accesses CRISPR intellectual property.

On July 19, 2019, Merck filed a petition with the United States Patent and Trademark Office requesting the initiation of an interference proceeding between its CRISPR-Cas9 patent application filed in 2012 and the patent application/patents granted to the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley).

For 15 years, Merck has been at the forefront of innovation, with extensive experience spanning from discovery to manufacturing.

As a user and provider of genome editing technologies, Merck supports research into genome editing while carefully considering ethical and legal issues. Merck has established an independent externalBioethics Advisory Panel, primarily providing guidance for research involving its business activities, including the study or use of genome editing; furthermore, out of consideration for scientific and societal issues, it has clarified the use ofScope, providing relevant information on how to use this technology to research and apply promising therapeutic approaches.

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