Kylin receives $250,000 IRS award to advance pRNAi nanoparticle cancer treatment research

Nov 11 2010

Officials of Kylin Therapeutics Inc. announces that they received a therapeutic discovery project grant from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service that will advance the company's pRNAi nanoparticle cancer treatment research.

“This grant is important because it will enable us to invest more in the research we are doing in the field of RNA interference”

The nearly $250,000 award from the IRS is in the form of a grant designed for biotechnology research and development that is critical for the advancement of new therapies. The grants are administered through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

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 grant is important because it will enable us to invest more in the research we are doing in the field of RNA interference," said Eric Davis, president and CEO of Kylin Therapeutics. "The pRNA research we are doing could provide a self-delivering cancer treatment that could give physicians a new drug delivery method in the treatment of cancer and other diseases."

Criteria for the therapeutic discovery project grant include the potential to:

• Result in new therapies to treat areas of unmet medical need or to prevent, detect or treat chronic or acute diseases.
• Reduce the long-term growth of health care costs in the U.S.
• Significantly advance the goal of curing cancer by 2040.
• Create and sustain high-quality, high-paying U.S. jobs.
• Advance U.S. competitiveness in life, biological and medical sciences.

Kylin's patented technology was discovered by Peixuan Guo, who 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.