French And U.S. Scientists Win Nobel In Chemistry For Work In Genome Editing

Topline

French scientist Emmanuelle Charpentier and U.S. biochemist  Jennifer Doudna were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for their work developing a method that allows for the editing of genes.

Key Facts

Key Background

While studying streptococcus pyogenes—a type of bacteria that causes many human diseases—Charpentier, of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, discovered a previously unknown molecule which is part of the bacteria’s immune system, along with CRISPR/Cas, that disarms viruses by cleaving their DNA. Charpentier published her discovery in 2011. In the same year, she started collaborating with Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley. Together they managed to recreate the bacteria’s genetic scissors in a test tube and simplified the scissors’ molecular components so they were easier to use.

Tangent

The discovery of CRISPR is so recent that it is at the center of a major patent conflict in the U.S. — with Charpentier and Doudna taking on Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was ignored by the Nobel committee. Stat News reports that a few months after Doudna and Charpentier’s breakthrough, scientists led by Zhang and, separately, Harvard University’s George Church, made CRISPR edit the genomes of living human cells in lab dishes. Because of the nature of the U.S. patent process, Broad Institute received patents on Zhang’s discovery in 2014 but the University of California did not. The University of California then challenged that decision, but lost both before a patent appeals board and later a federal appeals court in 2018. The Patent Office initiated a second hearing of the dispute in 2019 and last month it ruled that Doudna and Charpentier had not demonstrated that CRISPR-Cas9 could edit plant and animal genomes in 2012, as their patent applications claim, and did not do so until January 2013, whereas Zhang did so in December 2012.

Further Reading

Scientists Who Made Landmark Discoveries About Black Holes Win Nobel Prize In Physics (Forbes)

Nobel Prize In Medicine Awarded To Trio Of Scientists Who Discovered Hepatitis C Virus (Forbes)