• We have licensed the exclusive worldwide rights to certain patents and patent applications developed at MIT, the MRC, TSRI and JHU and directed to the design, selection and use of ZFPs and ZFP TFs for gene regulation and ZFNs for gene modification.
  
• We have also internally generated intellectual property resulting in thirty-one U.S. and fifty-four foreign issued patents to date.
  
• Our Enabling Technology Agreements are typically non-exclusive and preserve our right to further develop any ZFP, ZFP TF or ZFN application.
  
• ZFP TFs regulate the expression of endogenous genes. This gives us an advantage from an intellectual property perspective and enables us to provide “work around” solutions for cDNA patents.

We believe that we dominate the intellectual property
in this space.
The company was founded with certain intellectual property licensed from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Johnson & Johnson, The Scripps Research Institute and Johns Hopkins University. These licenses grant us worldwide exclusive rights to make, use and sell ZFPs and ZFP TFs. All of these patent families have been filed in the United States and most have been filed internationally in selected countries. We believe these licensed patents and patent applications include all of the early and important patent filings directed to design, selection and use of ZFPs and ZFP TFs.

Our own internally-generated patent filings are directed to improvements in the design and use of ZFPs and ZFP TFs. We will continue to license and to internally develop intellectual property covering the generation and composition of ZFPs, the genes encoding these proteins and the application of ZFPs and ZFP TFs in therapeutics, pharmaceutical discovery, and plant agriculture.

We endeavor to retain our rights to our ZFP intellectual property.
Our Enabling Technology Agreements are typically non-exclusive – we endeavor to retain our right to use the ZFPs that we design in various commercial applications with partners or for our own product develpment programs.

ZFP TFs regulate endogenous cellular genes and therefore provide ³workaround² solutions to cDNA patents.
An important differential advantage of our technology relates to the fact that we use ZFP TFs to regulate endogenous cellular genes. A basic tenet of patent law is that genes and proteins as they occur “in nature”, i.e. within the context of the original cell or organism may not be patented. A patent may only be granted if the gene or protein has been altered so that it can be used outside its original context i.e. if the gene has been cloned or the protein purified. Using our technology to upregulate the expression of an endogenous gene provides ourselves and our partners with a mechanism for “working around” a cDNA patent.

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