Alnylam Pharmaceuticals this week announced that it has been notified that the Chinese patent office intends to grant a patent, assigned to the Max Plank Society and exclusively licensed to Alnylam, covering siRNAs.
According to the company, the patent application — No. 01820900.9 — is part of the so-called Tuschl II family of intellectual property and covers the compositions, methods, uses, and systems of double-stranded RNAs having key structural elements including a length of between 19 and 25 nucleotides; one or more 3' overhangs at the ends of the molecule; and chemical modifications on the 3' end.
The application also claims the use of such molecules to modulate gene function in mammals or pathogen-derived genes in vitro and in vivo, Alnylam said.