Agilent Technologies has announced a new licensing agreement with Cirena, a biotech specialising in the high-purity chemical synthesis of RNA for research in CRISPR, gene editing and therapeutics, for the use of its long RNA purification technology.
The pair said the agreement targets a persistent limitation in synthetic RNA production — maintaining chemical purity as construct length exceeds 100 nucleotides — which has constrained scalability and reproducibility in longer RNA designs.
Maintaining high chemical purity becomes increasingly challenging as RNA exceeds 100 nucleotides, affecting the reliability of long RNA synthesis with traditional methods.
Agilent's advanced purification approach effectively addresses this issue, enabling the purification of longer RNA constructs to a higher purity than standard methods.
Higher-purity RNA then enables improved performance in applications such as pegRNA and gRNA-based genome editing and functional genomics assays, where synthesis-derived impurities can directly affect editing efficiency and reproducibility.
"Agilent's purification IP reflects years of foundational work aimed at overcoming the limitations of conventional long RNA purification," said Thomas Redder, an Associate VP of Global Strategic Business Development and IP Transactions at Agilent Technologies.
Licensing this technology to Cirena enables broader research access to high-purity long RNA constructs that have historically been challenging to produce with consistency and scale.
"By integrating Agilent's purification technology with our RNA synthesis platform, Cirena will address purity and scalability constraints that have limited routine production of longer RNA constructs," added Doug Dellinger, CEO of Cirena.
For biotechnology and pharmaceutical teams, this enables more reliable access to high-purity 100-300 nt RNA for genome editing, functional genomics and other research workflows where experimental outcomes are sensitive to synthesis-derived impurities.
By incorporating Agilent's purification method, Cirena stated it will be able to streamline production workflows and reduce turnaround times for gRNA, pegRNA and similar RNA designs.