The University of California, Berkeley and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have been arguing over the patent rights to a gene-editing technology called ‘CRISPR-Cas9’.

In April, lawyers of the UC Board of Regents asked the United States Patent and Trademark Office, an agency in the US Department of Commerce, to consider again the patents that were given to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. According to the legal team, the rights to the process belong to the team off Jennifer Doudna, professor of chemistry and molecular and cell biology at the UC Berkeley.

Brett Staahl, a UC Berkeley postdoctoral associate with the Doudna Lab, said, “The CRISPR-Cas9 technology functions as a precise and programmable scissors” that enables scientists to modify DNA sequences in a much more reliable way than other gene-editing methods.”

According to Staahl, the technique could change the game for academic research. The technology is one treatment that is capable of curing the underlying cause of a genetic disease, Staahl added.

The rights to develop the technology for commercial use have been in arguments since last year. The patents were disputed after Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute was given patent that provides the researcher and his research center to commercially control the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR-Cas9.

The UC Office of the President did not provide information on the issue. On May 11, The New York Times reported that the lawyers disputed that the researcher’s evidence was sufficiently related to the technology.

About three years ago, Doudna’s team published a paper in the journal Science, where the team described the technique. As per the National Library of Medicine, papers that were published on the technology in 2014 were over quadruple the number in 2012.