Building on the result, Decoy has opened an exploratory program to design D-MAVs against filoviruses, including Ebola and Marburg. The candidate was engineered on Decoy's IMP3ACT™ platform to block coronavirus entry, where it has shown nanomolar to picomolar activity across known coronavirus strains. Its activity against Ebola Zaire, a filovirus responsible for 17 of the last 20 Ebola outbreaks, demonstrates the value of the platform's founding premise that one drug engineered against common viral machinery can address many viruses and serve many people.

"Viruses don't operate in a one-drug, one-virus silo, and our industry's legacy reactive model has left the world playing catch-up against viral threats," said Rick Pierce, Chief Executive Officer of Decoy Therapeutics. "Our respiratory program remains our priority and our path toward the clinic. What this result changes is our sense of how much more the platform can reach."

In the same testing, the candidate also showed in vitro activity against Lassa fever virus, an arenavirus. Filovirus diseases, including Ebola, Marburg, and Lassa fever are among the conditions eligible for the FDA's tropical disease priority review voucher program, which supports development of treatments for diseases that lack sufficient commercial markets.

"We engineered this D-MAV against a mechanism coronaviruses depend on, and it inhibited filovirus infection because they rely on the same class I fusion machinery," said Dr. Barbara Hibner, Chief Scientific Officer and Co-Founder of Decoy Therapeutics. "This activity validates the strategy behind our broad-based antiviral platform, and demonstrates the breadth of D-MAV effectiveness. We are now designing new D-MAVs for multi-viral inhibition of filoviruses and arenaviruses, the development of which we believe our platform can accelerate."

Addressing commercial markets and pandemic preparedness through the same work is how the platform is meant to operate, and this result shows the design can be effective. An ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, caused by Bundibugyo virus and lacking any approved vaccine or treatment, underscores why that reach matters.