Plant Bioscience Limited awarded US patent on RNAi
Plant Bioscience Limited (PBL) announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued out US Patent No. 8,097,710 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 this new patent (8,097,710, issued 17th January 2012) comes as further recognition by the USPTO 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.
The first of PBL’s patents to be granted by the USPTO, based on Hamilton and Baulcombe’s work, was US Patent No. 6,753,139, which issued in 2004, for methods of detecting gene silencing in plants. In April 2010, patent number 7,704,688 issued with claims directed to detection of gene silencing in mammals. Now, issuance of this most recent patent acknowledges the role of short RNA molecules as the common mediators of gene silencing in different species and organisms, and protects the use of short RNAs for the purpose of inducing the silencing of a target gene in a cell.
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