SIGA Technologies, Inc., a commercial-grade pharmaceutical company focused on the health safety market, today announced a partnership with KaliVir Immunotherapeutics to make TPOXX® available for use with the KaliVir vaccine oncolytic immunotherapy platform. This new oncolytic platform contains several proprietary genetic modifications that can be combined to generate a unique oncolytic virus optimized for systemic delivery and antitumor immune stimulation. As part of this collaboration, SIGA is providing its TPOXX oral capsules to support future clinical programs.
“We are excited to announce this partnership with SIGA Technologies,” said Helena Chaye, Ph.D., JD, CEO of KaliVir. “Linking oncolytic immunotherapy to an effective antiviral agent is an important part of developing new treatments and we look forward to enhancing our innovative oncolytic immunotherapy programs with the support of SIGA’s TPOXX.”
On July 13, 2018, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved oral TPOXX for the treatment of smallpox to mitigate the impact of a potential bioterrorism outbreak or attack. Preclinical studies have shown that TPOXX is active against most orthopedic viruses, including vaccinia. In 2020, SIGA entered into several collaborative agreements, including a partnership with Turnstone Biologics to provide TPOXX to support Turnstone’s clinical oncolytic immunotherapy with vaccinia programs. In 2021, SIGA began a pre-clinical research collaboration with Bioarchitech to study TPOXX, enabling higher doses of vaccinia vectors when used in conjunction with Bioarchitech’s vaccinia-based oncolytic immunotherapy platform.