On Nasdaq and trades under the ticker DCOY. During today's discussion, the company will be making forward-looking statements, and I encourage everyone to view the company's latest SEC filings on their website at decoytx.com for the latest information. Rick, we've been really looking forward to having you on our platform. We saw your press release today. A lot to talk about, but since you're fairly new to the Virtual Investor platform, we'd love for you to walk through the story. I'm going to turn it over to you.
Terrific, thank you. Everybody, as Janine said, we are obviously subject to our forward-looking statements, so please, as Janine said, go to our SEC filings if you have any questions there. Just to give you some overview of the company and why I'm very excited to be here today to tell you about it, is that we were founded five years ago to create a new class of drugs that we call designable multi-antivirals, or DMAVs. We've been successful in doing that. Now we're about to really embark, over the next 12-24 months, on taking two of those programs from a preclinical stage into clinical stage in a clinical setting that allows you to get human proof of concept very rapidly, as you'll hear a little later. These drugs are positioned in very large markets.
Our COV program, our pan-coronavirus program funded by the Gates Foundation, actually is positioned in a $4.96 billion market. We're excited by the first lead program's opportunities that will validate the second program, R triple, which will be a drug for flu, RSV, and COVID. We are also funded by Google, NVIDIA, BARDA, and the European Union. I think most of you probably understand the impacts of a viral infection during the flu season. We all get the flu, and then the family gets it. It actually creates an enormous economic burden, and for older and very young people, can be very deadly. There is actually, with fewer people getting vaccines, a very urgent need for better antivirals that can serve more broad-spectrum needs in the antiviral space.
What we do is really make a single drug that can work across multiple viruses as opposed to one antiviral that can only treat a single indication. We call these Designable Multi-Antivirals. Your traditional antiviral, one drug, one virus, or a DMAV, or a Designable Multi-Antiviral is one drug, multiple viruses, and even in some cases, multiple viral families. We believe that our broad targeting of things like flu and COVID and RSV with one drug is far easier for the medical system because you all now know you can get tested or test yourself at home for flu, COVID, and RSV.
If you were able to then get a simple prescription like you can get for Paxlovid to treat any of those very effectively, or take a drug that could prevent you from getting that, which our drugs can do both, that would be obviously very exciting. They're self-administrable. They're an inhaled nasal spray in a liquid form or a dry powder. Whoops. We shot through there. Sorry about that. For some reason. Our pipeline is our pan-coronavirus product, which is backed by the Gates Foundation, and we expect to be in the clinic in the first half of 2027, followed pretty quickly by our DCOY-TRI program that we expect to bring into the clinic by 2028. That is a program which is currently designed to look at pan flu, RSV, and COVID all in one.
Then we've got a number of other undisclosed viral infections that we're building up a library around to be able to treat. Some of our drugs actually are, for instance, you'll see here our Decoy pan-coronavirus program works in more than just COVID. It works in SARS and MERS as well, and that's true with just about everything that we design. Our IMP3ACT program is really meant to be focused on alpha-helical conjugates. We're looking at envelope viruses only, so closed loop. We use AI and machine learning to build these or design these molecules. What we do is we effectively have a viral fusion inhibitor peptide, which is the blue squiggly line that you see here, with a linker and then a fatty acid or a targeting tail. We can really make these in multiple combinations.
We can either make them as a single squiggly line, if you will, or called a monomer, or you can make two. We can have two different drugs or two of the same drug, but more potent. We can make these using AI in a very rapid, repeatable, scalable design phase. Basically using standard equipment, we can manufacture these drugs at scale. We can print them out in the lab using a peptide synthesizer, or we can actually scale them at very large scale in peptide manufacturing plants, which are available on every continent today. We can do this in days, not months, in terms of discovering these drugs, and then we refine them, then take them through preclinical animal testing and then toxicology, and then as we're doing now, really advancing the programs toward the clinic over the next year to two years.
We can make these drugs in a process that's very different than how peptide drugs are made today. Typically, peptide drugs are made in pieces and stitched together, and what we have patented is a process by which we can make the single peptide molecule on a resin and then cleave it from the resin with one purification step. What that means is we can reduce the cost and the time to make these drugs in a factory or in our lab. The cost differential in purification steps is significant. For every purification step you have in a factory, that's a risk that your lot could go south. If you only have one purification step, it's very simple and straightforward in your manufacturing and far cheaper.
In terms of what we do on the AI machine learning side, we basically, as many of you may be aware, we have done a partnership with Quantori and developed a dashboard by which we can now, our home is the Google Cloud, and we have a systematized computer system that effectively anybody skilled with the software that we use and our own software that we've developed in terms of scripts, we can make new molecules in hours to days and then basically build those on a machine, print them out, test them. We can print them out in hours, and then basically send them off for testing.
What we learn from those tests, we can put back into the system, and the computer then begins to learn about how it should design the next molecules, whether it should put a new amino acid in there that's non-natural, so it won't get degraded by a certain enzyme in the body, for instance. We look at efficacy and pharmacokinetics and the formulation manufacturing, and we can predict the cost of the molecules through this same process. We've also signed a Global Access Commitment Agreement with the Gates Foundation, which allows us to license and tech transfer a drug that we make in our labs for an antiviral, and basically distribute that to both commercial and in places like the U.S., Europe, or into lesser developed nations like South America, Brazil, Africa, and places like India.
Our partner in that particular, our financial sponsor, and sponsor in that operation is the Gates Foundation, which is the largest non-governmental organization, basically, in the world for global public health. We've got a very strong partner. How our drugs work, we basically target the fusion machinery of 250 viruses and 11 viral families of envelope viruses. These viruses include things like RSV and herpes and COVID and measles or Ebola. Then what we do is we build decoys. We build physical blocking capability by which our drugs are basically waiting for the virus to fuse to the host healthy cell. Once that virus begins to come into contact, our decoys basically block that viral fusion from occurring. This particular fusion mechanism is conserved, highly conserved, as you'll see in a minute, across multiple viruses in the families that we're going after.
If you look, we've made DMAVs or peptide conjugates that target the viral fusion machinery, as I mentioned. As a result, we're able to stop an infection, or we're able to block the infection from even entering your body. We can either make these drugs as a prophylactic protection, or we can make these drugs so that they actually can be used as a treatment after you're infected, much like a Paxlovid. If you want to think about how could you make a drug that works across multiple viruses, well, as you see here in the picture, the fusion cores as seen by cryo-EM or X-ray crystallography of RSV or SARS-CoV-2 or flu, in this instance, H3N2, you can see that within two angstroms, the purple, green, and pink are almost identical.
If you targeted that area, which is called the fusion core of the virus, which nobody else has done, you're actually able to block the virus from invading a healthy cell, or you're able to knock down the viral load if the virus has already invaded and you're treating the virus. Very simple concept, and then we go and we make thousands of these sequences in the computer and test them until we come up with the sequences that we think could work, and we then print them out using a peptide synthesizer and send them out for testing. The markets that we're addressing with our lead product, if we used it as a treatment, for instance, if you look at Paxlovid last year, Paxlovid was Pfizer's second-largest drug in their pipeline of revenue and did $4.9 billion of annual sales. Paxlovid has comorbidities.
It works pretty well, but you can't take it if you're on a number of drugs as well. We think we have an opportunity, if we're successful, to take a chunk of this revenue in terms of a treatment, and we could also use our drug, this pan-coronavirus, as a prophylactic protectant instead of a treatment. In doing this program with the Gates Foundation, we would be looking at high-risk immunocompromised patients. This product is self-administered. It's an inhaled or nasal spray that enables localized respiratory protection for up to a day, and we're working on a formulation that potentially could work for up to a week or more. Clearly with vaccines for COVID, people are taking far less of them.
This product potentially fills an important gap in the future for people who either don't have an immune system and where a vaccine won't work or people who don't want to take vaccines. We see the opportunity, with the broad coronavirus coverage, to have a very successful product in the future. We've tested it against a number of different types of coronavirus and shown that it works very well in both pseudotyped and live viruses of a number of different types of COVID that you're probably familiar with, as well as SARS-CoV-1 and MERS. A product that can work not only in your typical COVID variant, but also in variants like MERS, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. A lot of opportunities using the same drug to go after new indications where there is no treatment or protective prophylactic.
We've shown in a number of different animal models that both for pre-exposure, PrEP, or post-exposure, PEP, prophylaxis, that we get very good control. You see here the untreated animal in control loses a lot of weight in the Syrian hamster model. That is indicative that that unprotected animal actually is not protected, and the animals that were treated are on the flat line there up above, are not getting sick and are protected. If you look at post-exposure, you can see that you get very excellent control of viral load, drops down very quickly, even up to 36 hours after the animal has been exposed to the virus in heavy doses. You're able to knock the viral load back down to practically undetectable.
How we plan to clinically develop these programs to get human proof of concept data, we are working toward a model with a company called hVIVO, which takes about a year from the start of your IND filing until you get your final study reports. You do a phase I safety study in Europe, in Germany, and you get your safety in PK. It takes about three months. As you're about halfway through that trial, you start a second phase II, a human challenge study. If you're doing, say, a prophylactic study, you would give patients our drug, and then a day later you'd begin to expose them to, say, SARS-CoV-2 on a regular basis and for one week. Then you follow those patients up for another week.
They effectively are staying in a challenge trial unit, so it looks very much like a hospital ward, very modern. They check in, they're healthy volunteers, and then they move into the treatment phase. They stay there for the entire two weeks and have a number of swabs taken of their nose and obviously symptoms, to see whether they've acquired the virus or not, and that is if you have a prophylaxis study. If you have a treatment study, slightly different model, and you treat them with the virus, they get sick, and then you begin to treat at different time intervals with our drug, and you test to see how well that patient does, versus, say, a drug like Paxlovid. Really quick readouts.
These trials take three to six months and about three months for your phase I, and then it takes a little while to get all the data crunched and into a final study report. Within about a year, you get a very good sense of whether your drug is going to work in humans. In the vaccine and antiviral space, about 70% of the time after they've gotten a successful phase II readout, these drugs go on to be approved. 70%, much higher than most other drug classes. Our triple program, pan-flu, pan-coronavirus, and pan-paramyxovirus, so flu, COVID, and better known to most of us, RSV A and B. This represents about 55%-70% of all virally driven respiratory tract infections on the planet. Very large market opportunity with a lot of unmet medical need.
A lot of people die of flu and still of COVID and of RSV, especially older adults and much younger children in places where they can't get very high-quality medical attention. In terms of the size of these markets, as I mentioned, there are significant deaths from RSV and influenza, and a number of hospitalizations. You're looking at, in flu, almost 500,000 hospitalizations a year and almost 200,000 in RSV. These are expensive hospitalizations, and patients do end up dying every year. That's in the United States. You can imagine in lesser developed countries, death rates are much higher, if they are in the same age bracket. Then, the idea is a single one drug, many viruses, or three in this case.
If you're stockpiling a drug, if you're a less developed country, or even a hospital, it's much more effective to have a single drug that can work against all three of these viruses. You just simply have to test. Even if you didn't test and you started treatment and then test, you're going to find out what you're treating for, very, I think, a unique model. Just to let you know, the types of viruses that we've seen, not only can we treat for SARS-CoV-2 and flu with one drug, and RSV, but these drugs are also active in other viruses. There's an opportunity to take, say, a COVID drug and use it in MERS or SARS, or NL63 and OC43, which comprise about 40% of all the common colds.
A lot of opportunities for use of these drugs, both in high clinical settings of older adults who are immunocompromised and young children or babies, but also in the broader population. From a corporate perspective, our team is very experienced. Our co-founders hail from being a professor of peptide chemistry at MIT, and my esteemed colleagues come from the biotech and pharma world. All of us have been involved in developing a number of drugs. My last company, Javelin Pharmaceuticals, we got a drug approved on the market in Europe, filed in the U.S., and the company was bought out by Hospira, now owned by Pfizer. I think we've got a very experienced team of drug hunters who are capable of developing this drug or these drugs, excuse me.
In terms of milestones, over the next 12- 24 months, we will have a significant number of milestones around both our DCOY-TRI program and DCOY-COV program, as well as other stealth assets we're working on. This includes things like publications, in vivo or animal studies showing data, PK and tox results, then ultimately resulting in an IND filing and getting the drugs into the clinic. Why now? I think Decoy is at the point where it has really transitioned from an early-stage private company to an early stage or a mid-stage public company that is really actively moving toward the clinic in the foreseeable future. With two, and as I told my board the other day, two and two. Two INDs in less than two years. That's our goal, and we're going to stick to it.
These, as you can see here, these products are positioned in very large markets. The comps for these products, a company who came up with an antibody for flu, long-acting for immunocompromised patients, was recently bought out by Merck for $9.2 billion or $221 a share. They actually use the same clinical trial program at hVIVO that we will use for our products, which is a human challenge study. I think you'll hear a lot more about our AI-accelerated design and synthesis capabilities this year as we design new drugs where one drug can work on multiple different targets and indications. I think the market itself for, say, a treatment for COVID that is better and easier to take than, let's say, a Paxlovid, is a large market. It's a multi-billion, $5.7. I think this year, actually, last 2025 sales were $4.9 billion.
We've received $6.5 million, $5 million from the Gates Foundation and the balance of that from others like BARDA and Google Cloud. A lot of non-dilutive funding as well, and we would expect to have more of that in the future. We would be looking at partnerships also over the next 12- 24 months, both strategic and academic, that would be value-building and of high profile. With that, I'll turn it back to Janine for questions.
Great. Excellent. Great presentation, Rick. Appreciate that run-through. Lots that you covered, but a lot of questions I'm sure will come of this. To our audience, if you click the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen, you type in your question, and we will get to as many as time allows. While we're waiting for some questions to come in, Rick, you covered a lot. I want to break down a couple of things because I think they're important points for investors to really be able to digest. How should our audience think about DMAVs versus vaccines, antibodies, or small molecules like Paxlovid, and how are DMAVs differentiated and potentially better?
Great question. Obviously, vaccines and antibodies, or antibody, what we saw during COVID is that with vaccines, and we see it with flu every year, they're either mismatched. You get a vaccine, you take the vaccine for the flu, and then you find out, like we did last year, that it missed the entire mix. The actual flu that was out there circulating was not included in the vaccine. You get some benefit, but not very much from the vaccines. With the vaccines, when they work, they work really well, but they also really have a problem with mutations of the virus, which happens constantly in flu and coronaviruses. With antibodies, you get a lot of resistance that occurs over a relatively short period of time.
We saw during COVID a number of promising antibodies that came along, and then within six to nine months to a year, they were rendered useless by mutations in the virus. With DMAVs, we're targeting an area of the virus for flu and COVID and RSV and all the other 250 viruses we're looking at. We're going after an area that doesn't mutate or hasn't mutated. Our pan-coronavirus drug has worked all the way through the coronavirus, the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, and right to current day to the most modern and up-to-date variants. It continues to work because we're not focused on the area of the spike protein that everybody else has been focused on. We're going after the fusion core that does not seem to have as many mutations occur in it. If they did, the virus would become unfit.
This new class of drug, where one drug can be used against many viruses, is really a unique opportunity to provide a whole new weapon, if you will, against things like flu and COVID and RSV, where vaccines and antibodies have shown to have limiting effect.
Great. Just my next question, I see some questions populating. Before we go over to our audience, why is targeting a conserved viral mechanism like fusion such a breakthrough versus traditional antiviral approaches?
Well, I think with traditional antiviral approaches, usually there's been one antiviral for one virus. Some of them are extremely effective. The HIV drugs, acyclovir for herpes. We're not saying that the traditional method doesn't hold value. The difference in our new class of drugs is that for envelope viruses, they are particularly good at being able to make a single drug that can work against many different viruses. Think about an antibiotic that you can take that treats a number of different, it might be your ear infection or your sore throat. You can take it for many different purposes. Our drugs are being designed so that they can be used for big commercial indications, and there may be opportunities to use these drugs in obscure niche markets that you would never develop a drug for, like MERS, Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome.
Where if you had a drug, it would be used quite a bit in places like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, where they actually drink camel milk and raise camels. Camels are the carrier of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. That's the real advantage is that you get a much more broad spectrum from one drug. It can be used for multiple different respiratory things. If we're successful with the TRI, you're covering potentially up to 70% of all respiratory infections with one drug.
Great. Okay, our next question. Well, actually, our first question from the audience, our next question in the lineup here. You announced that Quantori agreement last month. How is that progressing, and what are the next steps?
Quantori basically recently completed the build-out, new architecture of our software for designing, building, and testing new DMAVs antivirals. That system is now up and running, and our workflows are 25-100 times faster, depending on the workflow. We took a system that effectively where individuals had to take data from one software program and then put it into another software program and then run that program, and then put it into another program and so on and so forth. Today, there's a dashboard, and that chemist or programmer, usually our programmers are chemists, they effectively can go from soup to nuts, from the starting to the finishing of the process. They can do it all on one machine, all seamlessly, all in the cloud. If you're skilled in the art, you can basically design.
You tell the computer what you're looking for, show it the sequence you want to design against, and then begin to build the attributes into that drug candidate. The computer goes off on its own for maybe a day, for up to a week, and it would come back and I might have designed 50,000 different sequences and then have come back and you ask it a bunch of queries, and it says, "Okay, well, these 25 sequences probably look really good." They begin to use their chemistry hat and say, "Okay, these 10 of the 25 probably are the most likely to have the best qualities to be drug-like." That's all what the software has done to design these. We print those out using a peptide synthesizer and send them out to viral testing labs, first in pseudotyped viruses, second in live viruses.
Right up to the BSL-3 and BSL-4 types of viruses, where you have somebody in a kind of a suit working in a lab with a dangerous virus. We can do all that now on a single kind of laptop without having to transfer from program to program. It's all seamless.
Great. Our next question, do you see yourself just getting ready for the next pandemic, or is there a general need for antivirals?
We are definitely not just building a company that's serving the next pandemic. That's an absolute. I think the benefit of what we do is that by targeting the fusion cores of viruses, we are effectively creating a drug for tomorrow that can be used today. The benefit of that is we can develop drugs that can be used. Good example, our COVID program or our pan-coronavirus drug worked in the first COVID virus, and it's working in the most recent COVID virus. That's not true of a lot of the drugs that were developed during COVID. That's not true even of the Moderna vaccines and the Pfizer vaccines. Those vaccines have to be retrofitted every time there are mutations. The newest mutation in pan-coronavirus, which is called Cicada, which you may have read about or seen in the press, has 75 new mutations.
You can believe that those vaccine companies are going to have to go back and make an entirely new vaccine. We don't have to do that. Once we've made that drug, it continues to work throughout the process. That actually is sort of built-in pandemic preparedness in your existing commercial drug. It's also sitting there waiting to be used in the future. If you had a drug that worked across three or four respiratory viruses like flu, COVID, RSV, but it also works in H5N1 and other flu viruses, that is an enormous step up because the drug's already there. You're already manufacturing it. You don't have to scramble. That's what we built over the last five years, is we wanted to build a company that prepared you for the future, but also made money for you today.
Excellent. Okay, our next question is if your technology works as intended, what does one drug, multiple viruses actually mean in practice for patients, physicians, and payers?
I think that's a really good question, and we've done a fair amount of work early on around our pan-coronavirus, and we're now about to embark on more market research for the TRI program. I think what it does, having a single drug, if you're a physician in a very busy world as we are today, in an overworked healthcare system, a primary healthcare physician, you come in, you may have a temperature, you're coughing, you have respiratory sputum. You could have COVID. You might have a sore throat. Is that the flu? Is that COVID? RSV is very different, so you'd have different symptoms. You'd probably be having more whooping cough-like cough. In those other two, it's a very blurred line until you get a test.
If you come in with symptoms of a common cold or COVID or RSV or the flu, a physician could give you our drug, and then if you had to wait for testing or if you're already tested. I mean, last summer I got COVID. I had a home test for flu and COVID. I took it. I had COVID. I literally went online, saw a doctor, and got Paxlovid prescribed, and it was in my hands in two hours. We envision that same system working for our drug or a physician in the hospital or at CVS or Duane Reade. They go into the pharmacy, they give you a test, and then you walk out with a prescription, or actually a packet of nasal sprayers of our drug. Amazon Pharmacy could deliver that to your house. They could deliver the test.
The ability to directly deliver the way even GLP-1 drugs are delivered today to your doorstep if you want. We can deliver not only an approved test that's already on the shelf, but also our drug. If you're thinking about a pharmacy, you don't have to stock as many drugs. Hospitals like that. They're trying to cut costs. There's, I think, a real need. Plus, these drugs are very affordable to make. We can make them for $1-$2 a dose, which is why Gates was so interested in what we're doing. We're going really for a volume game long term in this business where we can charge a little less and distribute to a lot more people.
That was a great question, actually. As you're walking through it made this whole opportunity completely real. That was an excellent question. Our audience does not disappoint, I will tell you that. All right, our next question. Actually, I'm going to combine several questions because we've had several people ask the same question. I'm going to kind of summarize the Cidara piece. What is your overarching development and commercialization strategy? And does that Cidara transaction, how does that play into your thoughts on the future and partnerships or licensing or the future of Decoy?
Sure. It's a question that I think about a lot. Well, first and foremost, I think looking at sort of our clinical path, what we've done in our development phase is we've created a system, an AI machine learning system that basically intuitively can design, build, and test an antiviral drug for multiple viruses. That's a very systematic sort of templated, software driven system that we've built. We then realized as we were doing this that the way you get vaccines and antivirals approved is using what is called a challenge study, where you actually take healthy volunteers and you either infect them with a virus and treat them, or you treat them with a drug and then expose them to the virus.
If you're treating, they're already sick, so you're looking at how much viral load can you knock that down better than the other drugs on the market. You look at the flu drug from Roche. It improved by one day. If you could knock that down from eight days to five, that's an enormous improvement. If you could prevent people from getting sick, and especially immunocompromised people who can't take a vaccine, that's a huge opportunity. Cidara was bought just on immunocompromised patients in flu. A person who may be going for dialysis, or they're going for getting their chemotherapy, and they basically get this large bolus of antibody in two shots, and they're protected for four to six months from getting the flu, and they now can go about their life of cancer treatment or dialysis.
We envision creating a single drug that can work against more, not just flu, COVID, RSV, things that are older people who are immunocompromised, cancer patients, kidney dialysis, transplant patients, all these people are highly fearful of not one virus. They're fearful of a number of viruses. If you can create a drug that can prevent them from potentially getting 55%-75% of all respiratory viruses, that's a big deal. If you could do that for all of us on this call today, you want to go to a concert, you want to go to a sports game, you want to get on a plane. I was on a plane last night coming up from London, and there are people coughing away.
Wouldn't it be nice if before you got on that plane, you had a couple sprays of DCOY101, and you know you're not going to get 70% of respiratory viruses circulating. That's the idea with Cidara. Cidara was bought out for $9.2 billion. I think that they had a very interesting product. Merck obviously needed to fill their pipeline. There were several other people in pharma bidding on that product. We know that for a fact. It's very clear that other pharmas are out there looking for these products. I was a banker for 15 years. Oftentimes, the first product out there isn't the best product out there. People oftentimes improve on products. Kudos to them. I think it's a great product. It's needed.
We're looking to create an even better product that's absolutely needed and that potentially can be brought in at a lower price. We'll see. I think we're going to be working fast and furious to bring that new product to the market because I think the market is ripe for it, and pharma's looking for it.
Excellent. We have another question that I'm going to summarize because people are on the same track here. Basically you talked about your milestones and development timelines, and so I think our audience is looking, a couple questions asked a few different ways. You talked about entering the clinic, starting your first in-human clinical studies, but that pathway, you mentioned months, right, instead of years, as far as in order to be able to get that additional data. That is, from my point of view, from just outside of the traditional biotech timelines for data. I think we had several people w rite in. Is that?
I got it.
Can you sort of clarify that?
I would encourage you all who are interested to go to fda.gov and look at Cidara's clinical trial timelines for their human challenge studies. They took one year to go from phase I to phase II-A and come out with a drug that worked in humans. One year. The beauty of sort of vaccines and why vaccines, people like Moderna, Pfizer, could make things so quickly is you can do these challenge studies, and you can do relatively small patient studies.
Yeah.
If you look at Cidara's phase II-A program, from phase I through phase II-A, it was less than 200 patients. You're talking about GBP 12 million-GBP 15 million, or pounds, excuse me. So less than GBP 20 million. The failure rate after that readout for vaccines or antivirals is 70% succeed and 30% fail. Not so true with other. You think about all the cancer drugs and other drugs.
Yeah. No, it's flipped, right?
If a vaccine works, 70%, it works.
Yeah.
They don't tend to sort of fall down after the fact. Same with antivirals. It's a very sort of truth or dare.
Right.
It's you go in, you do these trials, and you're going to know when you walk out. For investors in biotech, having worked in capital markets for 15 years, the neat thing about that is that you go into a phase I, and we all know you go into phase II trials, and what do stocks do? They go, they climb the wall of worry, and then you get a readout, and they sell off because you got to go into phase III. An investor can invest now, and they basically can climb part of that wall of worry, and they can decide, do I want to take some of my money off the table and play with the house's money going forward? That's what a lot of funds do.
They'll come into a name like ours, and they'll invest, and basically, because the market is a discounting mechanism of the future, it tends to tell you what the future's going to look like. In phase II clinical trials, company stocks often go up, and companies often raise money, and investors often sell before the top. Some people don't. I think it's a unique situation. Go back and look at Enanta. You go back and look at Cidara, both antiviral developers. Look at their phase, their ex vivo studies in phase I and II and see how their stocks did during those periods, and you will see there's a definite pattern. Cidara went to $60 on their phase II-A readout, and then on the phase II, they went to $120, and then they were bought out for $221.
Excellent.
For a single asset.
That's more near term. I think our last question from our audience before we have some closing thoughts. A question came in. Stepping back, if Decoy executes successfully, how big could this platform be beyond respiratory viruses?
It's a great question. It's one that early on, if you go back and look at our early SEC filings or even our merger SEC filings, you're going to get taken to school on how big this platform can be because the SEC wants you to tell everybody and give full disclosure. We could, today, begin to embark upon looking at G coupled-protein receptors and their peptides. They're ligands for peptides, and we know how to design peptides against those GPCRs. Cancer is much more complicated than viruses. Viruses are really, in retrospect, looking at oncology, where there are multiple redundant pathways, there's a lot of resistant pathways, it's more difficult. We have scoped out a couple of areas that we think could be potentially low-hanging fruit.
We also have, in the Salarius merger, we acquired an asset that we are going to ultimately convert into a universal PROTAC degrader. What that means is that that universal PROTAC is a drug, and you put a targeting moiety on it, and it goes, and you then systemically deliver it, not nasally. You deliver that into the body and, let's say it was a colorectal cancer, you could deliver it through the gut. It would basically be targeting tumor cells or precancerous tumor cells that have that peptide ligand on it. It would go in. It would effectively take the protein of interest that causes that cancer cell to proliferate. It would tag that with the E3 ligase, which is the cell's own garbage disposal, and chop it up, so the cell dies.
That drug then gets recirculated and goes around and around through the system. We do have programs. I think they're so early that it's not worth us trying to prognosticate. With the antiviral work that we've done, we're really confident in the. We have animal data. We've got pseudotyped data. We've got live virus data. We don't have that in cancer. We have a dream, and we have some really interesting concepts. I think over the next couple of years or less, you'll see us potentially talk about some of those. I think if we just look at Cidara, one product, $9 billion. I think that we've got a great market in antivirals, and we're also working every day to try to think about very specific targeted ideas. We've got to keep focused. We're a small company.
We have a relatively low burn, and we have a relatively inexpensive clinical trial strategy as we move forward here compared to other companies that are in cancer or CNS, but focus is really important. I think while we have great ideas and the platform is going to be big, in my opinion, we need to stick to our knitting and get a couple things done really well, and then we can have all the opportunity we want to really take this platform to places where we believe we'll have other successes.
Excellent. Well, I'm going to conclude with one question that I like to ask as we close out these sessions. I feel like, Rick, that you answered this about 10 different times from my point of view. You did on the last slide. First of all, congratulations on all-
Thank you.
your progress. Such an exciting time for Decoy and the team, and investors. Speaking of investors, to all those on the line right now listening to this story, you went through a great presentation. We had some great questions, but we have to end it. Why should investors consider doing the work, getting up to speed on the story, and thinking about becoming an investor in Decoy Therapeutics right now?
Sure. I think a couple reasons. When I worked in the investment field at Lehman Brothers, for instance, we used to say to people, funds in particular, but high net worth individuals, you want to get into a new area of biotech. You probably want to own the top three or four companies. You want to own a big one, the mid-size, and the small-size companies. We are a unique play in the antiviral space. Gilead would be the king of antivirals, or GSK, another major player in the antiviral space. If you have a portfolio in the biotech space, we represent an opportunity to be on the ground floor of very likely one of the first antiviral drugs designed by AI or designed by people using AI, to get into the clinic and potentially be successful.
If we do that at our current valuation, and we do that, they're going to go from our current valuation to being more reflective of a Cidara or an Enanta or one of the larger players. I think there aren't that many times you have opportunities to do that in a new space. I'll give you an example on my own investment life. I saw John Maraganore at Cowen give a presentation about Alnylam, and I said, "Two and two." John said, "We're going to do five and five." I took a little bit of his idea in our two and two INDs in two years. He said we're going to do five drugs in five years. I don't think they did five, but they did three. Alnylam's an enormous company trading.
Right. Sure
$400 and some odd dollars a share. I bought that stock, and it was, like, $5 or $6. It went to $30. I sold it. I made a great return, but if I just kept half of it I would be even more happy than I am today. That's an example of where you see a new technology. That was not a proven technology. It was brand new. You saw a very cogent, well-delivered presentation. Actually, he used 29. He used, like, 30 slides in 20 minutes and talked. I thought I was listening to the used car guy. As I first heard, and then I listened, I was like, "Wow, these guys know what they're doing." There's an example, true life example in my own life. I bought it while I was sitting in the room.
Alnylam's now a huge company, so in my career in banking and sales and trading and focused on biotech, there were numerous times where I saw companies early on. At Amgen, when I was at Merrill Lynch, we did off-balance sheet debt instruments or something with warrants. Amgen became an enormous company, so if you owned some of those warrants, you made a lot of money. I think you don't put your life savings in small biotech companies, but I think for your high-risk portfolio, if you're patient over the next 12-18 months, I think we're going to do some things right, and if we do half of what I just said we're going to do, I think we will be rewarded, and our shareholders and stakeholders will be rewarded as well.
Excellent.
I spent my life doing this. I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't believe in what I was doing.
Perfect. You have that track record, but so does your team, and I encourage people to look at your website to check out the team. The marquees on their past experience of the companies that they spent a lot of time with and the successes there. You have an excellent team. A lot of exciting things ahead for Decoy. Rick, so grateful for you to come on our platform.
Yeah. Pleasure.
Share your story. Lots of good things happening for Decoy, and we're going to pay attention. We're going to have you back and have our audience, hopefully will follow. With that, this does conclude our Virtual Investor Closing Bell featuring Decoy Therapeutics. I'd like to thank Rick for joining us today. I'd also like to thank our audience for your participation and great questions as always. As a reminder, Decoy trades on Nasdaq under the ticker D-C-O-Y. If you like what you saw today, I encourage you to visit decoytx.com for more information on the company, to sign up to follow the company, to receive their alerts, as well as follow their social channels to stay current on the latest information. You can also visit virtualinvestorco.com for a replay of today's segment as well as our latest events calendar. Rick, thanks again.
To our audience.
Thank you, everyone. Thank you Janine. Te rrific.
Thank you so much. Yeah, and I wish everyone a great rest of your day.
Thank you.