Mar 11, 2008 - Nastech Pharmaceutical Company Inc. (Nasdaq: NSTK) announced today that it has completed filing 83 patent applications (79 international applications and 4 U.S. applications) directed toward 144 different genes with siRNA's designed and modified using Nastech's proprietary RNAi technologies. These gene targets are disease-validated against cancer, inflammatory disease, and metabolic disorders. Overall, these patent applications are directed toward tens of thousands of targets.
The inventions involve the use of Dicer substrates (25-30 nucleotide two-stranded duplexes), Meroduplex substrates (three stranded constructs with an antisense strand of 15-30 nucleotides and two sense strands), and non-chemically modified base substitutions with specific, experimentally determined sequences within the 144 gene sequences, which include the disease-validated targets. The inventors of this target gene patent estate, Drs. Steven Quay, James McSwiggen, Narendra Vaish, and Mohammad Ahmadian, are all Nastech employees.
"Today's announcement is the culmination of our multi-year intellectual property strategy in RNAi," stated Steven C. Quay, M.D., Ph.D., Nastech's Chairman and CEO. "Our goal has been to provide a patent estate for potential partners that is independent of the two primary, exclusively licensed commercial IP estates, one such estate directed broadly to RISC substrates without reference to target genes and the other such estate directed to a set of target genes that operate with either Dicer or RISC. Until now, these two estates effectively tied up the most interesting and commercially promising targets for just two companies to exploit. For the first time in several years, all 20,000 human genes are once again available for development through our patent estate enabling us to pursue any disease target of our choosing without the need to obtain licenses to existing patents."
No comments:
Post a Comment