Meletios deal with Institut Pasteur to develop new class of antivirals

Meletios Therapeutics, a French biotechnology company formed in 2020, announced it has signed an exclusive license agreement with the Institut Pasteur for the development of a new class of antiviral treatments.

This licensing agreement will provide Meletios Therapeutics with access to a state-of-the-art technology platform for generating Defective Viral Genomes (DVGs), copies of a parental virus with substitutions or deletions in its genomic sequence that alter its functioning and its pathogenic properties.

Meletios Therapeutics intends to study the potential of these non-infectious viral sequences for the partial or total inhibition of the replication of several pathogenic viruses and ultimately for the development of next generation antiviral treatments.

The license agreement with the Institut Pasteur will enable Meletios Therapeutics to generate and develop in collaboration with Insitut Pasteur’s Marco Vignuzzi, DVGs derived from Zika virus, an infectious agent that appears by epidemic waves (1.5 million cases during the last epidemic in Brazil in 2015) and can cause very significant neurological damage to fetuses of infected pregnant women; and Chikungunya, a pathology that has infected millions of people since 2005 and can be very painful and cause disabling long-term rheumatological and joint sequels. No effective antiviral treatment exists to date for these two indications.

Meletios will also have a pre-emptive right to study and develop, via this technology platform, DVGs from other RNA viruses that may be of therapeutic interest.

"This licensing agreement reinforces our second research program. It is perfectly in line with our commitment to develop new classes of antiviral treatments targeting a specific virus as well as entire families and to strengthen the therapeutic response in the event of an epidemic,” said Catherine Matre, chief executive of Meletios.

"We are delighted with this agreement with the Institut Pasteur, a leading organization in the fight against viral infections, which gives us access to valuable expertise for the selection of DVGs of interest for future antiviral treatments. With this agreement and a stronger cash position following the 2021 financing, Meletios Therapeutics now intends to accelerate the development of its research programs to offer its innovative antiviral solutions as soon as possible for the treatment of diseases for which no real therapeutic solution exists today," she added.