Taking care with CRISPR

With more than 2,000 patent families related to CRISPR technology, we are seeing more follow-on patent applications being examined before the European Patent Office (EPO). Inventive step objections being raised generally fall into two categories: that a technical problem is not credibly solved in the patent application as filed, or that it would at least be obvious to try to use CRISPR over other known gene-editing techniques.