Officials of Kylin Therapeutics Inc., a leading RNAi company, announced that they have received a notice of allowance from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for its first U.S. patent application.
This newly allowed patent, exclusively licensed to Kylin by the Purdue Research Foundation, broadly covers a number of functionalities for Kylin's lead technology platform "pRNA", or "packaging RNA." These include: receptor binding, ribozyme activity and RNA-interference.
"We are excited that the patent office recognizes pRNA as an entirely unique platform in this crowded intellectual property space," said J. Eric Davis, J.D., president and CEO of Kylin Therapeutics Inc.
Along with its already-granted European counterparts, Kylin officials believe that this seminal patent family will represent rare "new ground" in the field of RNAi and therapeutic RNA. Kylin has several other applications in the pipeline and continues to file in this area.
"The unexpected, pharmacologically-robust nature of the pRNA platform continues to allow us to claim more ground in areas such as RNAi and tissue targeting," says Joseph Trebley, Ph.D., vice president of research and development.
Kylin's pRNA intellectual property is based upon a family of patents around the discoveries of Peixuan Guo, Ph.D., and others at Kylin, on the design and creation of novel, therapeutically relevant RNA molecules. Guo made the discovery while at Purdue University.