Science

Target What Viruses Share.

Every virus looks different on the outside, and traditional antiviral programs treat that difference as the whole problem. They build a new drug for each new threat and lock in their decisions early, which makes them slow to start and slow to adapt.

Decoy looks at what viruses have in common instead.

Many enveloped viruses rely on the same basic machinery to fuse with and enter human cells, and that shared machinery is a target. The fusion cores of viruses as different as RSV, SARS-CoV-2, and influenza are structurally near-identical, close enough to overlay almost exactly. Design one drug against that shared structure well, and the same drug can be engineered to work across a whole set of viruses, with each new program building on what the last one taught us.

How a D-MAVTM blocks infection

D-MAVs are peptides designed to physically interfere with the fusion step viruses use to get inside human cells. By blocking that step, a D-MAV halts infection at the earliest possible point, before the virus can replicate. Because the fusion machinery is so similar across many viruses, a single designed peptide can act across many of them, and because Decoy starts from peptides that already exist in nature, each program begins from a validated starting point and is then optimized for potency, stability, and manufacturability through a design, build, test, and learn loop that gets sharper with every candidate.

That is the approach behind every D-MAV. The platform that turns it into real candidates is IMP3ACTTM.

Explore D-MAVs Learn About the IMP3ACT Platform

One Platform.
A Pipeline Built to Grow.

View Our Pipeline