ExonHit patents microarrays for analysing RNA splicing events

French drug discovery company ExonHit Therapeutics has been issued an important patent by the US Patent and Trademark Office that will further enhance the company's position in the field of alternative RNA splicing.

The patent, which is entitled Qualitative Differential Screening (n°6,251,590), covers microarrays optimised for the monitoring RNA splicing events.

Applications of these microarrays - which include drug discovery, diagnostics, and toxicogenomics - are all described in this patent. Additional, more specific applications included in the patent are compound screening for efficacy or toxicity, as well as in screening patients to determine the potential efficacy of therapeutics.

The new patent broadly protects nucleic acid arrays, and the methods used to create such arrays, which allow the detection of alternative RNA splicing events via either intron-, exon-, or splice junction-specific probes. Such types of probes are necessary to monitor the expression of splice variants in a robust and quantitative manner. This technology platform is complementary to ExonHit's DATAS (Differential Analysis of Transcripts with Alternative Splicing) technology for discovering splicing events. Importantly the claims in this new patent, which has a priority date of March 1998, are not restricted to splicing events generated via DATAS.

'Our goal is now to commercially leverage this important IP position as quickly as possible by providing licenses to both manufacturers and end-users,' said Bruno Tocque, ceo of ExonHit Therapeutics. 'The microarray market is growing, and interest in alternative RNA splicing microarrays is accelerating. There is little doubt, given the growing recognition of the importance of alternative splicing in biological systems, that the next generation of commercial chips will be designed to include splice-related information.'