Jennifer Doudna

Scientists and co-founders Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna received the prestigious award Wednesday.

A biotech startup has been issued a patent that involves CRISPR, the breakthrough gene-editing method that has sparked a nearly unprecedented intellectual property feud between some of the country’s biggest institutions. But it’s unclear what effect, if any, the patent will have on that fight.

The Boston biotech Editas Medicine went public on Wednesday armed with unusually big ambitions and resources: It aims to cure genetic diseases with a hot and controversial technology, called CRISPR, which allows scientists to precisely “edit” DNA. Before going public, the company was backed by more than $160 million in private money from Bill Gates, Google Ventures, and more than a dozen other investors. But all of that now rests on a heated intellectual property feud between two renowned scientists, each of whom claim to have invented CRISPR. One is Jennifer Doudna at the University of California at Berkeley, the other Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But they weren’t always rivals: They co-founded Editas in fall 2013.