Reading "Heroes of CRISPR" [1] it sounds like that, after Cell rejected the paper, they shortened the claim but it was still very much known to them:
> Finally, Siksnys showed that the system could also be reconstituted in a second way—by combining purified His-tagged Cas9, in-vitro-transcribed tracrRNA and crRNA, and RNase III—and that both RNAs were essential for Cas9 to cut DNA. (They would ultimately drop the second reconstitution from their revised paper, but they reported all of the work in their published U.S. patent application filed in March 2012 [Siksnys et al., 2012]).
> Siksnys submitted his paper to Cell on April 6, 2012. Six days later, the journal rejected the paper without external review. (In hindsight, Cell’s editor agrees the paper turned out to be very important.) Siksnys condensed the manuscript and sent it on May 21 to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which published it online on September 4. Charpentier and Doudna’s paper fared better. Submitted to Science 2 months after Siksnys’s on June 8, it sailed through review and appeared online on June 28.
While "Heroes of CRISPR" is a fairly detailed history of the whole affair, it's always worth noting that it was written by Eric Lander, the director of an institute with a strong vested financial interest in having the story interpreted in a particular way.
There is something mesmerizing about an evil genius at the height of their craft, and Eric Lander is an evil genius at the height of his craft.
Lander’s recent essay in Cell entitled “The Heroes of CRISPR” is his masterwork, at once so evil and yet so brilliant that I find it hard not to stand in awe even as I picture him cackling loudly in his Kendall Square lair, giant laser weapon behind him poised to destroy Berkeley if we don’t hand over our patents.
This paper is the latest entry in Lander’s decades long assault on the truth...
> Finally, Siksnys showed that the system could also be reconstituted in a second way—by combining purified His-tagged Cas9, in-vitro-transcribed tracrRNA and crRNA, and RNase III—and that both RNAs were essential for Cas9 to cut DNA. (They would ultimately drop the second reconstitution from their revised paper, but they reported all of the work in their published U.S. patent application filed in March 2012 [Siksnys et al., 2012]).
> Siksnys submitted his paper to Cell on April 6, 2012. Six days later, the journal rejected the paper without external review. (In hindsight, Cell’s editor agrees the paper turned out to be very important.) Siksnys condensed the manuscript and sent it on May 21 to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which published it online on September 4. Charpentier and Doudna’s paper fared better. Submitted to Science 2 months after Siksnys’s on June 8, it sailed through review and appeared online on June 28.
[1] -- https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(15)01705-5