Dicerna Licenses Baulcombe Patents

Today, the technology licensing arm of The Sainsbury Laboratory and the John Innes Center in the UK (PBL) granted a non-exclusive license to Dicer-substrate company Dicerna for the therapeutic use of the recently emerged fundamental RNAi trigger IP, the Baulcombe patent family.  It follows a similar, non-exclusive license granted last year to Alnylam and confirms the importance of this patent family, especially for companies conducting research and business in the US where patents from this family have issued.

Although the terms, not just the financial ones, but also those regarding sublicensing rights were not disclosed, I would think that the payments are more than token amounts and that certain sublicensing rights are covered.  Notably, Dicerna has an important relationship with Japanese Pharma Kyowa Hakko from which it announced in January that it would receive a $5M milestone payment.  This could be construed to have infringed the patents at issue and provided the final motivation for the license.    

Given that the first therapeutic license was given to Alnylam which focuses on 20-23mer RNAi triggers and the second one to Dicerna which works on 26-29mers, it is interesting to speculate whether PBL aims to increase the attractiveness (and cost) of the non-exclusive license by providing exclusivities regarding specific RNAi trigger structures.  This question is an important one for companies like Silence Therapeutics as they might be shut out from the 20-30 base-pair range should this be the case.

Coming Up: TKM-PLK1 phase I data presentation by Tekmira at AACR.