MDRNA said this week that the US Patent and Trademark Office has issued the company a notice of allowance for a patent application "covering methods for the delivery of siRNAs as well as a broad array of compounds with pharmacological activity."
The intellectual property "identifies and protects peptides that were discovered using MDRNA's proprietary Trp Cage Phage Display Library, and describes targeting peptides that demonstrate high binding affinity to, and internalization by, hepatocellular carcinoma cells," the company said.
It was filed as a divisional application to patent application No. 20070197444, entitled "Phase-Displayed Cell-Binding Peptides," which claims "a tryptophan cage-binding domain polypeptide containing all or part of [a defined] amino acid sequence … [as well as] a cell-binding domain polypeptide having an amino acid sequence produced by phage display."
"This is the second notice of allowance that we have received in the past four months from the USPTO for a patent application that covers the use of our proprietary targeting peptide technology," MDRNA President and CEO Michael French said in a statement. "The identification of additional peptides with high affinity to specific cell types, including certain cancers, further strengthens our broad patent estate."