How a CRISPR Startup Took on a $50B Giant — and Won

One of the biggest patent roadblocks in CRISPR medicine has just been permanently removed. It took a private startup, two determined individuals, five years of litigation, and an unwavering conviction that the law would ultimately bend toward what was right.

In 2021, Jason Steiner and Ilan Feuchtwang co-led Synthego's decision to go on offense. Steiner, driving commercial and strategic direction, and Feuchtwang, serving as General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, initiated legal proceedings to invalidate two Agilent Technologies patents covering fundamental chemical modifications to CRISPR guide RNAs — chemistry embedded in nearly every CRISPR-based therapeutic program in development today. Agilent, a $50 billion life sciences giant, had been pressing Synthego to license those patents. Synthego refused, and sued first.

The asymmetry was stark. Synthego was a private startup. Agilent was one of the largest and most well-resourced biotech companies on earth. Most companies in Synthego's position would have quietly signed a licensing agreement and moved on. Steiner and Feuchtwang made the opposite call — because the underlying patents, they believed, were simply wrong. The chemistry Agilent claimed as proprietary had already existed in prior art. And the stakes of letting those patents stand extended far beyond any single company: had they survived, they would have funneled the supply of essential CRISPR materials through a single provider, effectively placing a toll booth across the entire field of gene-editing medicine and slowing the development of therapies that could transform patients' lives.

The legal journey ran the full course. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board invalidated both patents in May 2023. Agilent appealed. The Federal Circuit affirmed the ruling in June 2025. Agilent escalated again, petitioning the Supreme Court of the United States. On April 1, 2026, the Supreme Court denied that petition. The case is closed, and the patents are gone.

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice," Steiner wrote, citing the maxim that had guided him through the fight. It is a rare thing in the life sciences — or in any industry — for a startup to initiate a fight of this magnitude against a company of Agilent's scale and see it through to final resolution. Feuchtwang's expertise across IP transactions, licensing, and biopharma governance was instrumental in navigating the complexity of proceedings that spanned PTAB, the Federal Circuit, and the nation's highest court.

The ruling's impact reaches beyond Synthego. With the patent thicket cleared, researchers and therapeutic developers worldwide can now work with these critical guide RNA modifications without the threat of infringement claims or the burden of licensing fees. CRISPR developers building treatments for genetic diseases — from sickle cell to cancer — operate on a more open landscape today than they did last week. That is, in no small part, the result of a bet two people made in 2021 that it was worth the fight.