Three Chinese Universities License IVD Patents for Liquid Biopsy, RNA Editing, and m6A Detection

Recently, Sun Yat-sen University announced a public notice of technology transfer. Through the Guangzhou Property Rights Exchange by listing transaction, it is proposed to transfer part of the rights held by the university in four RNA editing-related patents to the co-owner RECORNA (Guangzhou) Biotechnology Co., Ltd. The transfer amount is 399,560 yuan.

Patent Name:

agRNA for RNA Editing

A Method for Obtaining ADAR Substrate Candidate Sequence Structures

A sequence that forms an editing substrate with an RNA editing target site

A Method for Screening Guide RNA

The main inventors of the patent conversion this time are from the team of Researcher Zhang Rui from Sun Yat-sen University, with core members including Yang Wenbing, Li Jin, and others. As the team leader, Researcher Zhang Rui has profound research accumulation in the fields of RNA editing and gene therapy.

Zhang Rui: Professor at the School of Life Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, and doctoral supervisor. Selected as a talent introduced under Sun Yat-sen University's 2015 "Hundred Talents Program," a national high-level overseas talent in 2015, and a talent in Guangdong Province’s 2017 "Pearl River Talent Plan" for innovation and entrepreneurship teams. Serves as a committee member of the Guangdong Bioinformatics Society. In the past five years, as the corresponding author, he has published multiple papers in internationally renowned academic journals. His work in RNA editing and RNA m5C has been widely recognized by peers in the RNA field. He was invited to contribute to the writing of the textbook *Epigenetics* led by Fudan University, responsible for the chapter on "RNA Editing," and has been invited to give keynote speeches at important international and domestic academic conferences in the RNA field.

Recently, the Technology Development Department of Peking University announced a public notice of achievement transformation, planning to grant an ordinary license for a patent titled "Method and Kit for Detecting N6-Methyladenosine" at a transaction value of "300,000 RMB + Sales Royalties." The patent originated from a research achievement published in May 2025 by Yi Chengqi's team from the School of Life Sciences of the university in collaboration with Wang Xiujie's team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in the journal Nature Methods.

The patent assignee, Hangzhou RecoRNA Biotechnology Co., Ltd., as a company focused on the biotechnology sector, aims to enhance its technological layout in the field of nucleic acid modification detection and expand its pipeline of related biological testing products by introducing this patented technology.

The core patent of the transaction focuses on the precise detection of N6-methyladenosine (m6A).

m6A, as one of the most prevalent chemical modifications in eukaryotic mRNA, plays a crucial role in RNA metabolism, physiological and pathological processes. However, traditional detection technologies have limitations such as reliance on antibody specificity, unstable enzyme activity, inability to perform absolute quantification, or high costs. This patented technology addresses the severe RNA degradation issue of the previous generation (GLORI 1.0) by innovatively developing two new detection methods: GLORI 2.0 and GLORI 3.0.

Yi Chengqi (born in June 1983) is a Boya Distinguished Professor at the School of Life Sciences, Peking University, and a dual-appointed professor at the College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering. He also serves as a researcher at the Joint Center for Life Sciences and the Beijing Research Center for Ribonucleic Acid. His research focuses on the dynamic regulatory mechanisms of nucleic acid modifications and the development of gene-editing technologies, establishing technical systems for detecting and manipulating DNA/RNA modifications, and leading research in the field of epitranscriptomics. In 2018, he received the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars. In 2022, he was awarded the Chinese Chemical Society’s Young Innovator Award in Life Chemistry and appointed as the Deputy Chairperson of the Science and Technology Committee of the Beijing Youth Federation. In 2023, he received the Zhongyuan Union Award for Innovation and Breakthroughs in Life Medicine, and in 2024, he successively won the Xplorer Prize and the Shulan Medical Youth Award. Yi Chengqi leads key R&D programs under the Ministry of Science and Technology and serves as the Deputy Director of the State Key Laboratory of Protein and Plant Gene Research. His laboratory is dedicated to studying the biological pathways, functions, and mechanisms of RNA/DNA modifications, as well as developing new methods for gene editing. To achieve these goals, multidisciplinary approaches including chemical biology, epigenetics, gene editing, single-cell omics, and genomics are comprehensively utilized to uncover novel functions and regulatory mechanisms of nucleic acid epigenetic modifications.