CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 17, 2006--Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Nasdaq: ALNY), a leading RNAi therapeutics company, announced today that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has allowed claims in a patent application that broadly covers methods for preparing small interfering RNAs (siRNAs), the molecules that mediate RNAi. The USPTO issued a ‘Notice of Allowance’ for patent application 10/832,248 in the ‘Tuschl II’ patent series. The patent series is exclusively licensed to Alnylam for RNAi therapeutics on a world-wide basis through an agreement with Garching Innovation GmbH, the licensing agent for the Max Planck Society. Based on the seminal research by Thomas Tuschl, Ph.D., a founder of Alnylam, the newly allowed claims broadly cover methods of making siRNAs for any target, with or without chemical modifications. Following a ‘Notice of Allowance’, the final issuance of a patent involves several administrative steps that typically are completed within three months.
