US Patent Issued to President and Fellows of Harvard College on Feb. 24 for "Cas9 variants and uses thereof" (Massachusetts Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Feb. 24 -- United States Patent no. 12,559,737, issued on Feb. 24, was assigned to President and Fellows of Harvard College (Cambridge, Mass.).

"Cas9 variants and uses thereof" was invented by David R. Liu (Cambridge, Mass.), John Paul Guilinger (Cambridge, Mass.) and David B. Thompson (Cambridge, Mass.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Some aspects of this disclosure provide compositions, methods, and kits for improving the specificity of RNA-programmable endonucleases, such as Cas9. Also provided are variants of Cas9, e.g., Cas9 dimers and fusion proteins, engineered to have improved specificity for cleaving nucleic acid targets. Also provided are compositions, methods, and ki...