US Patent Issued to President and Fellows of Harvard College on Nov. 18 for "Switchable Cas9 nucleases and uses thereof" (Massachusetts Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Nov. 18 -- United States Patent no. 12,473,573, issued on Nov. 18, was assigned to President and Fellows of Harvard College (Cambridge, Mass.).

"Switchable Cas9 nucleases and uses thereof" was invented by David R. Liu (Cambridge, Mass.) and Johnny Hao Hu (Cambridge, Mass.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Some aspects of this disclosure provide compositions, methods, systems, and kits for controlling the activity and/or improving the specificity of RNA-programmable endonucleases, such as Cas9. For example, provided are guide RNAs (gRNAs) that are engineered to exist in an "on" or "off" state, which control the binding and hence cleavage activity of RNA-programmable endonucleases...