New patent on the prime edit­ing of DNA award­ed to Broad In­sti­tute's David Liu

The genome edit­ing rev­o­lu­tion will be patent­ed. Or at least that’s the case for this lat­est US patent, award­ed Tues­day to the Broad In­sti­tute’s David Liu and team for the com­po­si­tions and meth­ods be­hind the prime edit­ing of a tar­get DNA mol­e­cule (e.g., a genome) that en­ables a nu­cleotide change and/or tar­get­ed gene mu­ta­tion, ac­cord­ing to the ab­stract.

De­vel­oped in Liu’s lab at the Broad In­sti­tute, which fa­mous­ly de­feat­ed Jen­nifer Doud­na and UC Berke­ley in court over CRISPR-re­lat­ed patents, the idea be­hind prime edit­ing — dubbed CRISPR 3.0 — was pub­lished in Na­ture in De­cem­ber 2019, and that spawned a start­up known as Prime Med­i­cine.

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