Dicerna Pharmaceuticals announced this week that it has taken a non-exclusive license to RNAi intellectual property held by Plant Bioscience Limited.
The IP includes US patent No. 8,097,710, as well as three related patents, which broadly cover the use of small RNAs to trigger post-transcriptional gene silencing and are based on the pioneering plant work of Sainsbury Laboratory researchers David Baulcombe and Andrew Hamilton.
In early 2012, a PBL official told Gene Silencing News that the organization aims to make the IP as widely available as possible.
Under the deal with PBL, Dicerna will have the rights to use the patented technology for human therapeutics. Financial terms of the arrangement were not disclosed.