ERS Genomics Licenses CRISPR-Cas9 patent and technology to Cellular Engineering Technologies

Recently, Dublin, Ireland-based biotechnology company, ERS Genomics Limited (“ERS”), has signed a nonexclusive license agreement with Iowa-based Cellular Engineering Technologies (“CET”) to grant access to its CRISPR-Cas9 patent portfolio. The financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

ERS was formed to provide broad access to the foundational CRISPR/Cas9 intellectual property for use as a research platform. ERS holds an exclusive worldwide license on these technologies from ERS co-founder, inventor, and Nobel laureate, Dr. Emmanuelle Charpentier.

Cellular Engineering Technologies (CET) is a biotechnology company in personalized and regenerative medicine.  Our mission is to decrease the cost and failure rate of drug development and create therapeutic modalities in regenerative medicine.  CET specializes in cell manufacturing and contract research services directed towards biopharmaceutical market segments that interface with stem cell technology. CET has over a decade of being in business with core competencies in specialized tissue culture media formulation and cell manufacturing along with research services that use human non-embryonic sources and non-controversial cells for bioprocessing.

The CRISPR/Cas9 is a revolutionary technology in which the molecular complex binds to the genome in living cells at any desired location. By this method, researchers use CRISPR as a “molecular word processor” to specifically alter the DNA sequence at the targeted sites (DNA deletion, insertion, or replacement), alter the regulation of the target locus, or tag the locus with markers.

ERS has a portfolio of over 60 granted patents with around 30 in the US alone. Some of the US patents include:

• 10000772: Methods and compositions for RNA-directed target DNA modification and for RNA-directed modulation of transcription
• 10227611: Methods and compositions for RNA-directed target DNA modification and for RNA-directed modulation of transcription
• 10301651: Methods and compositions for RNA-directed target DNA modification and for RNA-directed modulation of transcription
• 10626419: Methods and compositions for RNA-directed target DNA modification and for RNA-directed modulation of transcription

CRISPR, an acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR), and this is usually done by the use of an enzyme called Cas9, there CRISPT-Cas9. CRISPR-Cas9 system has revolutionized the field of gene editing, facilitating efficient genome editing by the creation of targeted double-strand breaks of almost any organism and cell type. CRISPR-Cas9 technology has been especially useful in gene therapy fields and has also been used for regulation of endogenous gene expression, epigenome editing, live-cell labeling of chromosomal loci, edition of single-stranded RNA, and high-throughput gene screening.

Author: Arindam Purkayastha, a Patent Attorney at IIPRD, in case of any queries please contact/write back to us at [email protected].