On Jan. 3, 2017, the Jackson Laboratory announced it had obtained CRISPR licenses from the University of California, Berkeley and the Broad Institute. With both licenses in place, JAX customers interested in mouse model generation via CRISPR that is fast, cost-effective, and extremely versatile with regard to genetic background should be protected from patent infringement litigation.

The dispute has attracted considerable attention for several reasons. Interference cases are rare and this may be the last large patent interference trial ever, now that the system has changed to “first-to-file” rules. Secondly, billions of royalty dollars are at stake, with millions being spent on legal fees and hundreds of millions being raised in venture capital for prospective commercial applications of the technology.

In 1982, Richard Palmiter of the University of Washington and Ralph Brinster of the University of Pennsylvania created the world’s first transgenic mouse that, importantly, showed germline transmission of the introduced gene. Soon after, gene targeting in embryonic stem cells though homologous recombination was demonstrated, and mice carrying targeted genes created by injecting the mutation-bearing ES cells into blastocysts were described, work for which Mario R. Capecchi, Sir Martin J. Evans, and Oliver Smithies received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2007.

For nearly three decades, these were the primary technologies available to scientists to create genetically modified mice. Alternative options were either to wait around for a phenotypically detectable mutation to arise spontaneously or to use mutagens to deliberately and broadly induce mutations, and then look for mice with interesting phenotypes.

Until recently, genome modification has been a relatively slow slog, requiring many months of cloning and cell culturing or founder line characterization, depending on the approach. CRISPR promises to be a more cost- and time- efficient alternative for creating new mouse models.