Last month, the US Patent and Trademark Office addressed for the first time the issues surrounding the patenting of RNAi at its Biotechnology and Chemical Pharmaceutical Customer Partnership conference.

The meetings, which are events where practitioners and lawyers can hook up with USPTO officials to talk shop, have been running for years, John LeGuyader, supervisory patent examiner of Art Unit 6135 (which oversees antisense-based technologies), told RNAi News. But it wasn’t until Feb. 3 that a session specifically focused on RNAi was added.