The Gene Editing Business: Rent Extraction in the Biotech Industry

Erica Borg and Amedeo Policante

Review of Political Economy, 2025, vol. 37, issue 4, 1510-1545

Abstract: This article analyses the mechanisms governing the extraction, circulation, and distribution of rent in the biotech industry. Building on recent scholarship, it contributes to debates surrounding the importance of rent in technoscientific capitalism. We analyse genome editing as a global labour process. Part One examines the ongoing patent battle over CRISPR-Cas9 as a struggle for control over a foundational biotechnology increasingly central to several industrial sectors: a process of enclosure that facilitates a shift towards monopoly, rent extraction, and financial speculation. Part Two then details how patented CRISPR technologies are valorised through the construction of global, multi-layered infrastructures of rent extraction based on complex webs of financial and licensing deals. Part Three maps the uneven global geographies of CRISPR patenting. It considers how monopoly power emerges through the continuous conversion of public research into private assets, and how this enclosure reinforces profoundly unequal systems of distribution of royalties and rents in the global biopolitical economy. We interrogate how CRISPR technologies cement and expand neocolonial geographies of rent extraction, privatising the economic benefits and socialising the ecological risks. Finally, we argue that an increasingly monopolistic corporate biopower mediates how genome editing technologies are developed, and which mutant ecologies are socially produced.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/09538259.2024.2401480

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