Pivotal CRISPR patent battle won by Broad Institute (opens in new tab)

It's good to keep in mind that CRISPR is but one technique to do gene splicing, it's not the concept itself. Different ways will be discovered now that it's proven to be viable.

Australian universities hold the patent on Wi-Fi. A fraction of sales of all hardware Wi-Fi devices goes to fund higher education in Australia.

I find it odd that we have state run/non-profit universities fighting over this. Something about the funding model at the academic level is truly fundamentally broken.

we’re about to find out. Editas Pharmaceuticals is, i believe, the sole commercial licensee by the Broad for CRISPR/Cas-9, and they are scheduled to begin human trials for a rare form of blindness in October.

Gene therapy has had some recent successes [0], but it is worth noting that many of the ongoing and recent clinical gene therapy trials don’t necessarily involve genome editing: go to clinicaltrials.gov, search ‘gene therapy’ and get 3741 results. Search ‘CRISPR’ or ‘TALEN’ and get ~21 results.

Edit: I should say that most of the gene therapy clinical trials don’t involve genome editing yet. Though it seems to me that, at least for some diseases, viral vectors that deliver DNA to cells without integrating DNA into the host cell genome (where the dna instead persists inside the cells episomally, and is maybe lost from the cells after some number of divisions) will have advantages over integrating vectors/genome editing-based approaches. That way, you don’t have to worry about the off-target effects of genome editing, and you have a treatment that doesn’t result in permanent changes to the genome.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4879992/

Closest I know of is Fierce Biotech https://www.fiercebiotech.com/

Sadly, I don't think so. Check your local meetups. Additionally, SynBioBeta has been an ok source for recent biotech news.

Lobste.rs is open source and you could potentially spin up an instance of it specific to some topic you're interested in.

https://write.narwhal.space/ was an attempt at making an instance for writers, but it seems to have gone into disrepair.