Respiratory Syncytial virus (RSV) causes debilitating infections worldwide with a significant economic and societal impact. During the feasibility study we expanded our market analysis, which clearly showed that despite the significant burden on society and economics, currently there are neither effective therapies to cure, nor effective vaccines to prevent RSV infections. Further, primary and secondary research indicated a clear need for therapeutic solutions to treat RSV infections in the clinic. Building on our initial market assessment, during the feasibility study we quantified the pharmaceutical antiviral therapeutic market as a multi-billion market with a clear gap due to the lack of marketed RSV therapeutics. These findings indicate that there is a clear need for our therapeutic products in the clinic and that our products will enter a clearly defined and high-volume market and fill an existing gap, suggesting that our project is economically sound.
During the feasibility study we also performed a more in-depth competitive landscape analysis, which allowed us to discover that several of our main potential competitors have interrupted their programs due to failure in clinical trials, mainly due to a lack of effectiveness of their therapeutic candidates. The competitive landscape analysis also allowed us to identify strengths and weaknesses in the current and potential future competitors, and most importantly, reinforced our findings from our market analysis, that there is a clear and unmet need for RSV therapeutics.
The more advanced technical analysis that we conducted during the feasibility study provided strong evidence that targeting essential virus protein-protein interactions is an excellent approach for developing therapeutics to treat RSV infections. Our analysis indicated that using short peptides as inhibitors of these protein-protein interactions represents a viable strategy and an alternative to the traditional pharmaceutical approach of using small molecule inhibitors. We confirmed that the innovative peptide stapling approach allows to develop peptide therapeutic candidates with superior pharmaceutical properties.
During the technical feasibility study, we also reviewed in more details the current stage of technology and identified the key milestones to achieve commercialization. For each key milestone, we outlined the main activities and developed a plan for implementing a given activity within ViRelieve or identified and contacted a partner specialized in a given activity. We estimated the costs of our project, which indicated a favorable return of investment, providing additional evidence that our project is economically sound.
Upon completion of the project and clinical trials, ViRelieve expects to have therapeutic products to treat RSV infections in the clinic. The more in-depth market, competition and technical analyses that we did during the feasibility study uncovered higher than initially estimated potential economical and societal impact of ViRelieve’s innovation: our product holds the potential to significantly decrease RSV-associated death burden and save thousands of lives in the pediatric, transplant and elderly populations. Further, our product is expected to significantly reduce the current RSV-associated hospitalization costs, relieving multi-billion dollar economic burden.
