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Patents

The global patent landscape of mRNA for diagnosis and therapy

Nature Biotechnology volume 41, pages 1193–1199 (2023)Cite this article

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The COVID-19 pandemic brought mRNA vaccines to market in a short period, pointing the entire drug development field in the direction of mRNA treatment.

Messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines have been studied as a novel therapeutic or diagnostic product since the early 1990s1. Scientific evidence shows that mRNA has a significant advantage over DNA: theoretically, it can express any protein and be used to treat nearly all diseases. Therefore, mRNA has become a potential drug modality for gene therapy, cancer treatment, autoimmune disorder treatment and vaccines. However, challenges such as the instability and immunogenicity of mRNA have consistently hindered the development of such drugs. In recent years, these problems have been largely resolved through the development of various delivery systems2.

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Fig. 1: Flow diagram of patent documents included in patent landscape analysis.
Fig. 2: Trend in mRNA patent applications during the study period.
Fig. 3: Collaboration networks of inventors and assignees.
Fig. 4: Characteristics of mRNA patents.
Fig. 5: mRNA patent citation frequency.

Data availability

All data in this study are available from the corresponding author upon request. Source data are provided with this paper.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grants no. 81972392, 82102902, 82272769).

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Mengru Lyu, Jiyuan Chen, Yeheng Peng.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Clinical Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Management, School of Pharmacy, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

    Mengru Lyu, Yeheng Peng, Luyao Gong & Yuan Gao

  2. Department of Clinical Pharmacy, School of Life Sciences and Biopharmaceutical Sciences, Shenyang Pharmaceutical University, Shenyang, China

    Mengru Lyu, Fang Han, Jingfei Guo & Lijuan Tian

  3. Department of Pharmacy, Shanghai Ninth People’s Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Jiyuan Chen

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  1. Mengru Lyu
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Correspondence to Yuan Gao.

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Nature Biotechnology thanks Mario Gaviria for his contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Lyu, M., Chen, J., Peng, Y. et al. The global patent landscape of mRNA for diagnosis and therapy. Nat Biotechnol 41, 1193–1199 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-023-01925-2

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