No one who follows biotech or genetics disputes the power of the gene-editing technique Crispr-Cas9. But plenty of reasonable people disagree about who invented it—and who has the rights to whatever discoveries result from it.
But the patent war over Crispr isn't just waged on the battlefields of academic publishing. The success of Crispr-based companies depends on public perception, too—and what better way to solidify that perception than on Twitter? Recently, WIRED noticed that Caribou Biosciences, one of the main biotechs hoping to capitalize on Crispr, is squatting on the Twitter handles most directly associated with the technology: @CRISPRCas9, @Cas9CRISPR, and @CRISPRediting. They're only Twitter accounts, sure. But by staking out, Caribou seems to be making a statement: This is our IP, so back off.
Caribou is just one of several early-stage companies that are vying to make money off of Crispr-Cas9. The company was co-founded by UC Berkeley biochemist Jennifer Doudna, whose team was the first to publish about the genetic editing technique in Science in 2012. But the patent to Crispr-Cas9's most important use currently belongs to the Broad Institute's Feng Zhang, who published a bit later about the system's application to editing in human cells. Whoever comes out on top of the patent dispute will have the right to license the system's use in anything other than microbes—that is, humans. That's where the real money will be.
(Or maybe it won't. last week, Zhang—who founded his own company, Editas—published results suggesting that a second protein, Cpf1, could perform the same gene-editing action as Cas9. He might get his own patent on that.)
While the fight continues, Caribou, Editas, and CRISPR Therapeutics—a third company cofounded by Doudna's collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier—will continue to raise money and their profiles. All together, the gene-editing biotechs have raised at least $158 million in venture capital, and Caribou closed an $11 million Series A fundraising round in April. That's impressive, especially given that the primary driver of that investment isn't a product, but the promise of one. Caribou's tech will be based on the company's exclusive license to foundational Crispr-Cas9 research from UC Berkeley and the University of Vienna.
Caribou's competitors, for their part, have already started building up their Twitter profiles. CRISPR Therapeutics started tweeting from @CRISPRTX in January, and Editas has been staking out @editasmed since April 2014. Even Caribou's spin-off human therapeutics company, Intellia, sent its first tweet from @Intelliatweets in November of last year. Caribou president and CEO Rachel Haurwitz said that it will be more active on Twitter later this year. Once it is, the company's Twitter handle could become a unique source of power—one that, for now, they've kept out of the hands of the competition.
