A holder of key patents to the Crispr gene-editing technology is willing to join a world-wide joint patent pool—a development that medical and legal experts think could hasten the development of new human therapies.

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, along with joint owners of Crispr-Cas9 patents Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Rockefeller University, submitted 22 patents for evaluation to the proposed pool, including key patents involved in a dispute over intellectual property rights to...