Salarius Pharmaceuticals merger partner announces series of drug candidates

Decoy Therapeutics announced that a series of antiviral drug candidates previously designed by its IMP3ACT platform to be broadly effective against viruses of the paramyxoviridae family also showed promising in silico activity against measles and Nipah viruses. As announced on January 13, 2025, Decoy and Salarius Pharmaceuticals (SLRX) signed a definitive merger agreement pursuant to which Decoy will merge with a wholly owned subsidiary of Salarius, subject to satisfaction of the closing conditions set forth in the definitive agreement. Upon consummation of the merger, the newly formed company will be named Decoy Therapeutics. Decoy’s IMP ACT platform strategy for antiviral therapeutics focuses on a mechanism that is broadly conserved across viruses, making it possible to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to design peptide-conjugate antiviral drug candidates with unprecedented activity against multiple viruses. Unlike preventive vaccines, these candidates act directly on the virus, and not on human cells or the immune system, to potentially stop or slow the virus from replicating, thereby reducing the severity or shortening the duration of the disease in infected persons. As demonstrated by these candidates, Decoy believes the IMP3ACT platform has the potential to change the economics of antiviral drug development by addressing multiple high health burden viruses such as RSV and hPIV and preparing the world for emerging future threats, like measles, with a single drug.