The Federal Court of Australia has delivered judgement in
Australia's landmark CRISPR patent dispute, finding that none
of the claims in ToolGen Inc.'s patent application for platform
CRISPR technologies are valid. The proceeding is an appeal from a
decision of the Commissioner of Patents in which the first
respondent – a strawman named Grant Fisher –
successfully opposed the grant of ToolGen's application.
The patent application
The case concerned ToolGen's application for CRISPR/Cas
systems and the use of those systems to introduce a site-specific,
double stranded break at a target nucleic acid sequence in a
eukaryotic cell.
The application was filed on 23 October 2013 and claims priority
from three provisional applications:
