Make microlove, not war

Rather than duking it out in the marketplace or in court, Isis Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Alnylam Pharmaceuticals Inc. have chosen to put their respective IP covering microRNA in one basket to form a 50/50 joint venture called Regulus Therapeutics LLC. The companies believe Regulus is the first pure-play miRNA therapeutics company, a space about which little is known but offers broad potential therapeutic utility.

The deal was primarily IP-driven. ALNY President and CEO John Maraganore said that if the companies had kept their miRNA efforts separate, each company's IP would have been fragmented. ...