RXi licenses oral RNAi tech from US university

The USA's RXi Pharmaceuticals, a biopharmaceutical company pursuing the development and commercialization of proprietary therapeutics based on RNAi, has licensed exclusive worldwide rights to certain technology for the oral delivery of RNAi therapeutics from its local University of Massachusetts Medical School. Financial terms were not disclosed.

"The development of technology that potentially enables oral delivery represents a truly dramatic advance for the field of RNAi therapeutics, and could open up significant market opportunities for RXi," said Tod Woolf, chief executive.

"We view this license as a major step toward our goal of developing such drugs, as it allows us to potentially target a new class of cells that cannot be accessed either by traditional RNAi delivery methods, local administration or injection. In particular, we believe that UMMS' oral delivery technology, which targets certain types of inflammatory cells called macrophages, may allow us to develop orally-administered rxRNA compounds for the treatment of a variety of significant inflammatory diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, Crohn's disease, atherosclerosis, psoriasis and type 2 diabetes," Dr Woolf noted.