Gene-Editing Battle Heats Up as U.S. Probes Who Invented First

The simmering battle over who was first to invent breakthrough gene-editing technology has erupted again at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board will investigate who was first to invent technology related to CRISPR, according to a notice posted on the agency’s docket. The review, known as an interference, is between patent applications filed by a group made up of the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Vienna, against patents issued to the Harvard University-affiliated Broad Institute.

The dispute is over CRISPR, or Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, which allow scientists ...