After nearly seven years of failing to win fundamental patents on the genome-editing technology CRISPR, a unit of one of the world’s largest life sciences companies has thrown a Hail Mary: Late last Friday, MilliporeSigma petitioned the U.S. Patent and Trademark office to open an interference proceeding between CRISPR-Cas9 patents that it applied for way back in 2012 and patents that the University of California has applied for or been awarded.

The unusual move — New York Law School patent expert Jacob Sherkow’s reaction was “holy s***,” and MilliporeSigma itself described the circumstances as “extraordinary” — seems to be the company’s last-ditch effort to pull out a CRISPR victory at the patent office, which it believes has treated its applications in a way that is inconsistent with how it has treated others.