Editas Medicine said the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office reaffirmed an earlier Patent Trial and Appeal Board decision that certain foundational CRISPR/Cas9 genome-editing patents belong to a group of institutions including the Broad Institute. The dispute, centered on inventorship priority, traced back to a 2022 PTAB ruling that Broad researchers were first to invent CRISPR/Cas9 use in eukaryotic cells, including human cells. The University of California, the University of Vienna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier challenged that decision and sought an interference in 2015, with the Federal Circuit later sending the case back for reevaluation over “conflating” legal standards around invention conception and reduction to practice. Editas emphasized that the reaffirmation preserves Broad inventorship priority and said its own licensed CRISPR/Cas9 intellectual property remains central to ongoing development, including EDIT-401. The ruling matters for CRISPR licensing economics and for how gene-editing developers manage freedom-to-operate risk in a competitive patent landscape.