2023-Japan-Decoy Therapeutics

SPEAKER: I think I understand platform.

RICK PIERCE: Yes, thank you.

SPEAKER: All right, Rick, thank you.

RICK PIERCE: Thank you, and I'd like to thank the ILP for inviting us to present today but also, importantly, to the ILP sponsors here in Japan who are both in the room and attending online. I'm very excited to be able to introduce Decoy Therapeutics, which was founded approximately two and a half years ago in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And our leading cofounder, Brad Pentelute, is a professor of chemistry at MIT.

And the company has about 10 employees, of which most of us are experienced senior executives from biotech and pharma and have developed drugs from an idea in a room to a drug and a patient, creating cures. And so let me advance my slide here. What we learned-- what you're going to hear about today is a platform technology, which is currently being applied to antivirals for respiratory disease but we believe has applications far beyond that.

So what we learned from the pandemic is that vaccines alone are not enough. And I think, as I look around this room and I walk around Japan and Tokyo, I'm reminded that the world needs more than vaccines. We need antivirals. And we learned that in the last few years that the vaccines just aren't going to be enough.

And so what we've done at Decoy is create a platform technology that can actually deliver antivirals in hours to days of receiving a virus of interest. And we call that the impact three platform. And the platform can deliver very valuable drugs to countries or-- oops, back here. Oops, I guess, yeah.

So what we're developing are peptide conjugates. And many of you have probably read in the press about peptide conjugates from Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, which are about to become the world's highest revenue-producing drugs. And what Decoy has developed is a platform that can develop more of these drugs very quickly, very rapidly.

Our peptide conjugates include-- [INAUDIBLE] they include a peptide sequence. They include a linker which is proprietary. We have a library of these. And then a lipid which is-- allows you to target specific tissues.

And we create targeted fast drugs which should be self-administered at home or at work. And we have programs for pan-coronavirus, RSV, and pan-paramyxovirus. Our corona [INAUDIBLE]-- our coronavirus program will enter the clinic later this year.

So how does it work? The product that we've developed is a nasal spray. If all of us had taken that spray this morning, we wouldn't need to wear a mask until tomorrow morning when we didn't have the drug on board.

What differentiates our drugs from other antiviral drugs is that our drugs are pan-viral family inhibitors. And what that means is that one drug that we develop can work across an entire family. So our coronavirus product works in MERS. It works in SARS.

It works in some of the viruses, coronaviruses that cause the common cold. And it also works in viruses which we don't know about yet or what the people in this room don't know about yet but are in animal reservoirs all over the world in animals like bats and pangolins which we all know about. And so we've done a lot of testing to show that our drugs works across the threats of today that we need to be careful about in our society but also about viruses that are coming in the future.

So why Japan? Japan is one of the oldest and aging populations in the world of developed countries. I think the premier here said second to Monaco in an article I read on the plane coming over.

And so the strategy is to develop our drugs in older patients who are immunocompromised, often from comorbidities, such as diabetes, cancer, obesity, and then expand-- once you get the registration-- expand that into global public health and broader use. Why these populations make sense is that oftentimes regulators will give you fast-track or breakthrough designations to expedite these drugs through the regulatory approval. So what we're looking to do here is establish a Japanese partner to do the drug development and clinical trials for Japan and Asia or Japan, to scale up and make or peptide [INAUDIBLE] in very large scale for the Asian markets and to distribute and sell them in Japan and Asia.

We have partnerships academically with MIT, the Pentelute lab, University of Toronto with Philip Kim for artificial intelligence, with the University of Waterloo in Canada for using artificial intelligence for forced viral evolution. We have public-private partnerships with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as partnerships with Johnson & Johnson and BARDA's Blue Knight program, where they pay for a large portion of our lab in New York City, which is rapidly growing. And then we are in talks right now with one of the European Union's largest public-private partnership, which would be the equivalent of Operation Warp Speed to pay $20 million of non-diluted funding for our phase I and phase IIa clinical study for our lead program.

So, with that, I'd like to thank you all. Obviously, we'll-- I'll be in the other room after lunch. If you're interested in learning more about how to partner with Decoy-- and, as I said, we're not just an antiviral company or a COVID company, we think this platform can be expanded into several other therapeutic areas. So, again, thank you to the MIT ILP team and all of you for your time today.

SPEAKER: Thanks, Rick.

[APPLAUSE]