High-Powered Labs Feud Over Gene-Editing Technology Patent

The Federal Circuit signaled discomfort with a 2022 administrative ruling that gave a Massachusetts medical research organization an edge in its race to secure a potentially lucrative patent on a genetic-editing invention.

Judge Todd M. Hughes pressed the parties at an oral argument Tuesday about whether the Patent Trial and Appeal Board misapplied a legal test for determining when an invention is conceived. That decision rejected arguments from two Nobel Prize-winning scientists that they nailed down the invention first.

The dispute between the Broad Institute and the University of California, University of Vienna, and French scientist Emmanuelle Charpentier, hinges on ...