Marina Biotech Regains Intellectual Property Rights to its tkRNAi™ Technology
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Marina Biotech, Inc. has announced that it has regained intellectual property rights to its transkingdom RNAi (tkRNAi) drug discovery platform for both agriculture and veterinary uses.
The Company is currently developing a human therapeutic based on the tkRNAi technology and recently announced the completion of dosing for Cohort 2 in the Dose Escalation Phase of its START-FAP (Safety and Tolerability of An RNAi Therapeutic in Familial Adenomatous Polyposis) clinical trial.
Cambridge Biolabs, formerly ViThera LLC, will maintain a license to tkRNAi for certain veterinary applications and, in turn, Marina Biotech continues to be eligible for milestone and royalty payments arising from those programs.
"We are pleased to see the progress Cambridge Biolabs has made with the application of our tkRNAi technology to the development of certain veterinary-based programs," stated J. Michael French, President and CEO at Marina Biotech.
French continued, "With Cambridge Biolabs' success in transitioning to their new business model, it was an opportunity for Marina to capture the broader agriculture and veterinary uses for its strategic efforts. We continue to pursue business relationships that leverage our broad nucleic acid drug discovery platform in the agriculture and veterinary sectors to fund the advancement of nucleic acid-based human therapeutics."
The transkingdom RNA™ interference (tkRNAi) technology is a broad-reaching platform that can be used to develop highly specific drug products for a diverse set of diseases.
The tkRNAi platform involves the modification of bacteria to deliver short-hairpin RNA (shRNA) to cells of the intestinal tract.
A significant advantage of the tkRNAi platform is oral (by mouth) delivery making this platform extremely patient friendly while harnessing the full potential of the RNAi process.
