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:
- US Provisional Patent Application 61/717,324 (“P1”) filed 23 October 2012;
- US Provisional Patent Application 61/803/599 (“P2”) filed 20 March 2013; and
- US Provisional Patent Application 61/837,481 (“P3”) filed 20 June 2013. Read more