When a modality's foundational patents are held by universities rather than the companies commercializing it, the licensing power sits upstream - and base editing in 2022 is a textbook case of that structure.
Aggregate the 2022 base-editing grants by owner and the academic concentration is unmistakable. Harvard's nucleobase-editor architecture claim US11214780B2, the General Hospital Corporation's precision and PAM-engineering grants US11326157B2 and US11286468B2, and Broad Institute filings anchor the foundational layer. The commercial names - Beam, Verve, and others - build on top.
The CPC clustering shows the shared core: C12N 9/22 (Cas class), C12N 9/78 (deaminase), C12N 15/11 (the editing-relevant nucleic acids), C12N 2310/20 (guide RNA). These classes recur across the academic owners because they describe the same fusion architecture claimed from different angles - a coordinated upstream estate rather than scattered independent inventions.
The strategic consequence is the inverse of a thicket. This is closer to a concentrated moat held by a few academic institutions, with the architecture grants forming a chokepoint. A commercial program's freedom to operate depends less on navigating dozens of small owners and more on securing licenses from a short list of foundational holders.
That concentration is also why base-editing licensing terms drew so much attention: with the architecture owned upstream, the economic split between the academic licensors and the commercial developers becomes the defining business question for the modality. The 2022 facet is the map of where that leverage sits - and it points clearly at the universities.