PBL awarded two US patents on RNAi

17-Sep-2012 - United Kingdom

Plant Bioscience Limited (PBL) announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued out US Patent No. 8,258,285 with fundamental claims directed to compositions to effect gene silencing and US Patent No. 8,263,569 with fundamental claims directed to methods of inducing gene silencing using short RNA molecules, or DNA constructs encoding short RNA molecules, in a wide range of organisms, including in plants and humans.

Silencing is a natural mechanism for down-regulating gene expression that is found in most complex organisms and it is the focus of tremendous activity in the life science industry. It has been widely exploited in research for gene discovery, and for characterisation of gene function. It holds great promise as a therapeutic tool, and currently “gene therapy” applications are being developed for ailments as diverse as cancer, viral diseases and obesity. The technology is also referred to as “RNAi”, short for RNA interference.

The award of these new patents (US Patent No. 8,258,285, issued 4 September 2012 & US Patent No. 8,263,569, issued 11 September 2012) builds on and extends the scope of claims, following the grant of US Patent No. 8,097,710 on 17 January 2012. These patents come as further recognition of the pioneering contributions of Professor Sir David Baulcombe and Dr Andrew Hamilton to the field of silencing. The original patent application based on this work was filed by PBL in 1999, following Baulcombe and Hamilton’s ground-breaking research at The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, UK and published in Science (“A Species of Small Antisense RNA in Posttranscriptional Gene Silencing in Plants”, (1999), 286, pp. 950-952). This paper provided the first identification that short RNA molecules are the active agents of silencing, and the patent describes methods and compositions for use of such molecules for inducing silencing in living organisms.

These new patents extend the previously allowed method claims into longer RNAi molecules of 20 to 30 nucleotides (US Patent No. 8,263,569) and now also include compositions for achieving silencing by the use of RNAi (US Patent No. 8,258,285). Therefore the scope of this invention has been significantly broadened to cover a wide range of applications in use in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and agricultural biotechnology industries. Research methods and reagents, as well as diagnostic tools and kits are also encompassed.

https://www.bionity.com/en/news/139697/pbl-awarded-two-us-patents-on-rnai.html