Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Nasdaq: ALNY), a leading RNAi therapeutics company, announced today that it has acquired the intellectual property (IP) assets of Nucleonics, Inc., a privately held biotechnology company. The Nucleonics IP estate includes over 100 active patent filings, including 16 that have granted worldwide and 6 that have been granted in the U.S., Europe, or Japan – the world’s largest pharmaceutical markets.

The Nucleonics IP estate includes certain early patents and patent applications, notably the “Li & Kirby,” “Pachuk I,” and “Giordano” patent families, that cover broad structural features of RNAi therapeutics and extend the breadth of Alnylam’s “fundamental” IP, which is comprised of the Crooke, Fire & Mello, Kreutzer-Limmer, Glover, Tuschl I, Tuschl II, Hannon, and Kay patent families. With this acquisition, Alnylam has extended the scope of its overall IP estate for RNAi therapeutics, which now includes over 1,800 active cases. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed; however, this transaction does not change Alnylam’s financial guidance of ending the year with greater than $500 million in cash.

“Nucleonics was one of the first companies in the RNAi therapeutics space focused primarily on gene therapy applications of RNAi. As they built their company, they acquired a number of early and broad patent families that are relevant for development and commercialization of all RNAi therapeutics, including synthetic small interfering RNAs, or ‘siRNAs,’ the molecules that mediate RNAi, which remain Alnylam’s sole focus,” said Barry Greene, President and Chief Operating Officer of Alnylam. “When added to our existing IP estate, which is already dominant in the field, the Nucleonics IP estate provides further strengthening of a portfolio that is buttressed across all possible dimensions. Importantly, Alnylam’s IP estate is defined by a very large number of distinct patent elements that in aggregate define the overall strength of our exclusivity in the RNAi therapeutics field.”

“The Nucleonics IP portfolio we acquired today adds very significantly to our current IP estate for RNAi therapeutics,” said Donna Ward, Ph.D., Vice President, Intellectual Property at Alnylam. “In particular, we are extremely pleased to obtain early and broadly applicable RNAi IP assets, including the Li & Kirby, Pachuk I, and Giordano patent families, which have very early priority dates going back to 1998. Clearly, these new IP elements complement our existing fundamental IP, such as the Crooke, Tuschl II, and Kreutzer-Limmer patent families, as well as many others – all of which Alnylam holds exclusively.”

Amongst over 100 active patent filings, the Nucleonics IP estate includes several early filed patent applications, including:

the Li & Kirby patent family (USSN:10/038,984, among other applications in the family) from the Medical College of Georgia, which covers methods for attenuating the expression of a target gene in vertebrates using a double stranded RNA (dsRNA); the Pachuk I patent family (USSN:10/009,134, among other applications in the family) from Wyeth, which covers double stranded RNA to reduce gene target expression, methods of inhibiting the function of a protein with dsRNA and multi-targeting dsRNAs, which target either the coding or non-coding portions of a gene; and the Giordano patent family (USSN:10/762,395, among other applications in the family), which covers methods of down-regulating expression of gene targets using RNAi, methods of achieving intracellular RNAi for gene expression regulation and therapeutic applications, and methods of identifying dsRNA delivery complexes with reduced toxicity.

Rodman & Renshaw, LLC advised Alnylam on this transaction.