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news.RXi Pharmaceuticals has licensed exclusive worldwide rights from the University of Massachusetts Medical School to certain technology for the oral delivery of RNAi therapeutics. Financial terms were not disclosed.
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The technology was developed by Michael Czech, professor and chair, program in molecular medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS) and an RXi founder, and Gary Ostroff, professor of molecular medicine at UMMS and an RXi collaborator.
RXi intends to work with pharmaceutical and biotechnology partners to advance the discovery and development of orally delivered rxRNA therapeutics for a host of inflammatory diseases.
Tod Woolf, president and CEO of RXi Pharmaceuticals, said: “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’s 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 II diabetes.”