Caribou Biosciences and DuPont recently announced a strategic alliance regarding their respective CRISPR/Cas intellectual property portfolios. This alliance is multi-faceted, involving a multi-year research collaboration, supported by IP cross-licensing deals and an equity investment into Caribou by DuPont.CRISPR/Cas is one of the hottest stories of the last few years in biotech, a system with the ability to accurately remove or edit specific genetic sequences within a wide range of living organisms. As it has also been shown to work in human cells, the potential uses for this technology – and thus its commercial importance – are growing at an astonishing rate. As expected given this commercial importance, a number of groups are battling over the right to use the technology for their own product development. The most well-known of these battles, between UC Berkeley and MIT/Broad Institute over the ownership of the CRISPR/Cas system, remains contentiously litigated – and may in any case have been sidestepped by the identification of the CRISPR/Cpf1 system.Against this backdrop are DuPont and Caribou Biosciences, both of which control patent portfolios covering a number of CRISPR/Cas technologies. DuPont, of course, is a giant chemical manufacturing firm which went on to play major roles in diverse fields such as agriculture and industrial biotechnology. Caribou Biosciences was co-founded by a number of scientists including Jennifer Doudna: one of the early pioneers of CRISPR/Cas9 research and half of the team which UC Berkeley claims should control CRISPR/Cas. Her discoveries have been recognised by such disparate awards as the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and TIME Magazine’s most recent list of influential people. As such, they have a number of general CRISPR/Cas patents, while DuPont has a portfolio covering the use of CRISPR in bacterial identification, immunisation, and guided genome editing.The major portion of the announced alliance covers the cross-licensing of intellectual property. Caribou will have access to DuPont’s IP, including Cas9 genome-editing IP licensed exclusively to DuPont by Vilnius University. They will be able to use these rights in the development of products in fields such as therapeutics, diagnostics, industrial biotech, and a subset of agriculture – crop development is likely to remain in-house at DuPont.DuPont will also fund a multi-year research collaboration between the two companies, primarily directed at improving the gene editing technology and its interplay with crop development processes. The CRISPR/Cas system is, according to the executive VP of DuPont, James Borel, “of particular interest to DuPont as a way to accelerate plant breeding”. This is due to two major reasons. First, CRISPR/Cas is fast, especially when compared to the traditional method of breeding to propagate desired crop traits. Second, the system can be adapted to deal with polyploid plants, those with multiple genome copies (many common crop species have up to 6 chromosome copies). Editing genes on each chromosome is slow and tedious, whereas ‘multiplexed’ CRISPR/Cas can achieve the same result in short periods of time. Both of these factors allow new strains, such as drought-resistant or high-yield crops, to be developed in vastly shorter times.Gene-edited plants (such as drought resistant corn which DuPont is currently developing using CRISPR/Cas) also benefit from reduced regulatory burden. As they do not contain genes from other species, they are not considered ‘transgenic’ and thus do not require the same level of safety and pest-potential testing – as has already been seen for gene-edited potatoes. In that case the researchers used engineered proteins known as TALENS, but the advent of CRISPR/Cas has led to an increase in the number of gene-edits in development. The combination of fast development times and simplified regulation (in the US, at least), means that products can be brought to market faster than ever before.Alongside these other announcements was the report that DuPont had made a minority equity investment into Caribou. Although the amount and details were not disclosed, it comes soon after a recent USD 11.55 million equity investment into Caribou by a several investors including Fidelity Biosciences, Mission Bay Capital, 5 Prime Ventures (whose founder, Jenny Rooke, will be speaking at SynBioBeta SF this year), as well as pharmaceutical giant Novartis. Given this, Caribou has sufficient funding for several years of development ahead of them – what they will achieve with this funding remains to be seen.