Intellectual Property

Our Early and Extensive Patent Estate

SNIPR has an early and extensive Worldwide patent estate directed to various aspects of CRISPR targeting of bacteria and archaea.

We have fundamental scopes protecting the use of CRISPR to combat infectious disease pathogens and to modulate human and animal microbiomes in patients. Our estate relates to the use of any Cas nuclease for this purpose, as well as to the use of Cas9, Cas3 and Cas12a (Cpf1) specifically. We have granted protection for harnessing endogenous Cas of target cells, or for using Cas expressed from vectors. Some of our scopes extend to guided nucleases generally (such as TALENs) and some scopes protect targeting of any bacterial species.

Our IP also relates to delivery vehicles, such as phage, phagemid, non-replicative transduction particles, conjugative plasmids and nanoparticles for delivering CRISPR/Cas systems. We also have protection for phage production strains and production methods.

We have protection for CRISPR targeting of bacteria in lung conditions, kidney conditions (such as UTIs), and infections associated with sepsis and septicemia. Our IP also relates to CRISPR killing of E. coli in patients, including in cancer and transplant patients.  We protect CRISPR targeting of antibiotic resistance in bacteria.

Our patent portfolio also protects various technologies for engineering microbiomes to express therapeutic proteins in situ in patients.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has issued a precedential ruling in favor of SNIPR in a patent interference case with Rockefeller University. All of SNIPR’s patents in the proceedings remain in force. Further details can be found here.

Examples of our inventions can be found in:

WO2016177682 , US11642363, US11788085, US11485973, US11471530, US11400110, US9701964

Our Non-Profit Patent Licensing Program

SNIPR is committed to enabling and fuelling the development of innovative therapies using the CRISPR technologies covered by its patent estate. To this end, SNIPR makes its technologies available to third parties for research purposes. For non-commercial academic and non-profit use to edit prokaryotes, no written license to SNIPR’s CRISPR patent estate is required.  More information can be found here.