The terms, per the grant. On October 20, 2020, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals was issued US10806791B2, "Carbohydrate conjugates as delivery agents for oligonucleotides." The CPC tags center on A61K 47/543 and A61K 47/549 (conjugate delivery), A61K 31/713 (siRNA) and C07H 21/02 — the chemistry of attaching a sugar ligand to a silencing oligonucleotide so the liver takes it up.
Why a deals desk cares: delivery is the whole game in RNA therapeutics. The GalNAc-conjugation approach is what let a class of drugs move from the clinic to the market and, critically, into licensing and collaboration structures with royalty tiers. Issued delivery IP is the asset a partner pays for, because it is reusable across many target programs.
The structure point: a delivery-platform grant earns its value differently from a single-drug grant. It can sit underneath a portfolio of programs, each carrying its own milestones, while the conjugation IP collects across all of them. For a term teardown, that is the difference between a one-shot royalty and a platform royalty that compounds.
What the document does not promise: that any one silencing program succeeds, or that the conjugation chemistry is the only viable delivery route. It is an exclusivity claim on a delivery method, not a guarantee of clinical or commercial outcomes — and competitors have pursued their own conjugate and nanoparticle routes.
The takeaway: when a teardown touches RNAi economics, the delivery grants are where the durable royalty value sits. Alnylam's October 2020 conjugate grant is a dated, concrete example of the platform IP that makes oligonucleotide deals bankable.