US Patent Issued to President and Fellows of Harvard College on June 9 for "RNA-guided human genome engineering" (Massachusetts, California Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 9 -- United States Patent no. 12,649,928, issued on June 9, was assigned to President and Fellows of Harvard College (Cambridge, Mass.).

"RNA-guided human genome engineering" was invented by George M. Church (Brookline, Mass.), Prashant G. Mali (La Jolla, Calif.) and Luhan Yang (Somerville, Mass.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method of altering a eukaryotic cell is provided including transfecting the eukaryotic cell with a nucleic acid encoding RNA complementary to genomic DNA of the eukaryotic cell, transfecting the eukaryotic cell with a nucleic acid encoding an enzyme that interacts with the RNA and cleaves the genomic DNA in a site specific manner, wherein the cel...