BARDA accelerates development of early-stage antiviral platforms with multiple collaborators
From the original on-line announcement

BARDA awarded contracts to multiple industry and academic partners through the Flexible and Strategic Therapeutics (FASTx) Program to advance a robust arsenal of adaptable therapeutic platforms. Such platforms have the potential to pivot quickly to develop treatments rapidly against new threats and efficiently mitigate the impact of viral diseases.

Safeguarding public health from the persistent threat of viral outbreaks is an essential part of national security but is made challenging by the fact that viruses continuously adapt and evolve. These new awards are part of BARDA’s larger effort to address gaps in conventional antiviral therapeutics through targeted technical improvements, such as biodistribution, product stability, improved formulations, and durability of protection. The growing FASTx portfolio of early-stage platforms represents a diverse group of antiviral strategies, including small interfering RNA (siRNA), nucleic acid-based antiviral antibodies, stapled lipopeptide fusion inhibitors, and CRISPR/Cas13a.

The awards were made through the BARDA Easy Broad Agency Announcement (EZ-BAA), which aims to support and evaluate a diverse group of highly innovative and early-stage medical countermeasures. The awards announced today are:

• $749,999 to Tiba Biotech to advance the development of their lung-targeted nucleic acid RNABL delivery platform. This platform uses biodegradable nanoparticle carrier technology to deliver an antiviral treatment utilizing small interfering RNA (siRNA). The siRNA design and delivery will be optimized to suppress viral replication. The project aims to evaluate the specificity and efficiency of delivering functional siRNA payloads to the lungs.

Tiba Biotech is developing a lung-directed nucleic acid delivery platform that uses a nanoparticle carrier technology to deliver small interfering RNA (siRNA) antiviral treatment to the lungs. This is BARDA’s first investment in siRNA-based antiviral therapeutics.

 

• $732,812 to Amplitude Therapeutics to evaluate a new formulation for their trans-amplifying RNA technology for in vivo expression of antiviral monoclonal antibodies (mAbs). The formulation will separate the replicase-encoding RNA from the antibody-encoding RNA for improved antiviral monoclonal antibody expression and flexibility of manufacturing. This project will assess the platform’s ability to enable stockpiling of the replicase and on-demand manufacturing of the antibody-encoding RNA. If successful, the technology has the potential to allow for a “plug-and-play” platform for pandemic response.

• $749,998 to Emory University to assess the utility of converting their mRNA-based Cas13a antiviral therapeutic into an inhaled, dry powder formulation. This new formulation aims to increase product stability while maintaining efficacy. The formulation uses Thin Film Freezing (TFF) technology and will be evaluated using multiple delivery routes.

• $749,999 to Red Queen Therapeutics to demonstrate the ability of their stapled lipopeptide fusion inhibitor platform to pivot to new viral threats. The platform is being developed to produce a rapid response, adaptable inhaled antiviral therapeutic and targets the earliest stage of viral infection by blocking viral fusion and entry into the cell. Additionally, this technology may be more resistant to viral evolution in comparison to conventional antivirals, such as antibodies. Under this award, Red Queen Therapeutics aims to demonstrate in vitro activity of a new antiviral candidate and generate preliminary in vivo proof-of-concept efficacy data in influenza models.

• $749,289 to RenBio to optimize the company’s Make Your Own (MYO) Technology DNA-based antibody delivery platform that leverages intramuscular electroporation (a gene delivery technique) to enable sustained production of antiviral antibodies. This project aims to address technical hurdles that may arise in scaling-up the platform to respond rapidly to a pandemic threat. This investment is BARDA’s first in plasmid DNA-based antibody delivery. This novel approach could achieve sustained production of antiviral antibodies, which may have the advantage of requiring less frequent dosing and lower cost than conventional antibody products.

All five of these efforts will assess platform capabilities that could be applied to multiple priority threats. Platform therapeutics directly support objectives in the BARDA 2022-2026 Strategic Plan to accelerate the development of agile medical countermeasures that can pivot and be brought to scale in response to new threats.

The FASTx program is one of the many ways BARDA is working to expand the U.S. government’s arsenal of flexible and adaptable therapeutic platforms to ensure more effective preparedness for viral outbreaks.

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About Tiba Biotech

Tiba Biotech is a preclinical stage biopharmaceutical company developing next-generation RNA vaccines and therapeutics based on a novel dendrimer nanoparticle delivery platform, initially developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. Tiba Biotech’s nanoparticle delivery platform can safely enable large vaccine and therapeutic payloads with relaxed cold-chain requirements and superior safety compared to existing RNA delivery technologies, providing protection against multiple human and animal diseases. This project is being supported in whole with federal funds from the Department of Health and Human Services; Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response; Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), under contract number 75A50124C00014. For more information about Tiba Biotech, visit www.tiba.bio, follow us on X (formally Twitter) @TibaBiotech and LinkedIn.

Media Contact:

Cody Cuccio

info@tiba.bio