ERS Genomics Completes 45 CRISPR Licensing Deals To Date, Largely For Screening, Discovery

As one of six companies with rights to out-license CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology, ERS Genomics Ltd. has completed 45 such deals so far, with most of the licenses taken by biopharmaceutical companies. ERS CEO Eric Rhodes told Scrip that while his company also makes deals outside of human life science applications, to date more than 90% of its licenses have gone to the biopharma industry.

Rights to the CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) technology are held by six companies in total, set up by holders of the intellectual property affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley(UCB)and [University of Vienna] – which Rhodes calls the Berkeley patents – and IP holders affiliated with Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Broad Institute