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news.Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, an RNAi therapeutics company, has announced the first grant for the Kay & McCaffrey patent, an early fundamental patent in the RNAi therapeutics field. The Kay & McCaffrey patent is licensed exclusively to Alnylam through an agreement with Stanford University.
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The Kay & McCaffrey patent was granted after examination by the Australian Patent Office with 38 claims that broadly cover methods and compositions of RNAi therapeutics, including a method of reducing expression of a coding sequence in a target mammalian cell with a double-stranded RNA of between 15 and 25 nucleotides in length.
In addition, the patent includes claims covering small interfering RNAs (siRNAs, the molecules that mediate RNAi) and short hairpin RNAs. The Kay & McCaffrey patent series, with these and additional claim sets, is pending in other jurisdictions, including the US, EU, and Japan.
Barry Greene, president and COO of Alnylam, said: We are delighted to add the Kay & McCaffrey patent to the broader portfolio of Alnylam held patents that comprise intellectual property (IP) which we believe is fundamental for the development and commercialization of all RNAi therapeutics.
This new grant, the first for the Kay & McCaffrey series, expands the scope of our fundamental IP estate that also includes issued or granted patents from the Crooke, Kreutzer-Limmer, and Tuschl II estates.