Officials of Kylin Therapeutics receive an issued patent from USPTO

Apr 7 2010

Officials of Kylin Therapeutics Inc., a leading RNAi company, announced this week that they received an issued patent from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

“This patent represents new ground recognized in the field of RNA interference”

"This patent represents new ground recognized in the field of RNA interference," said Eric Davis, president and CEO of Kylin Therapeutics. "pRNAi is the only self-delivering RNA-based nanoparticle that induces RNA interference to be granted a patent by the USPTO. We are very pleased, not only for our company, but because this type of technology could give physicians a new method for drug delivery in the treatment of diseases including various forms of cancer."

Kylin's pRNAi is a nanotechnology platform that leverages the power of RNA and a natural process called RNA interference (RNAi) to directly target and "turn off" disease-causing genes.

This issuance follows a notice of allowance made in October of 2009.

The patent's issue date is February 2, 2010. The newly issued patent broadly covers a number of functionalities for Kylin's lead nanotechnology platform, "pRNA," or "packaging RNA." These functionalities include receptor binding, ribozyme activity, and RNA-interference.

The patent's principal author is Peixuan Guo, who invented and developed the pRNA technology when he was a professor of molecular virology and biomedical engineering and faculty scholar at Purdue University. Guo served as director of Purdue's Nanobiotechnology Interdisciplinary Graduate Program and as director of a NIH Nanomedicine Development Center. He is now an endowed professor and director of the Nanomedicine Bionanotechnology Center at the University of Cincinnati.