Inovio Expands Collaboration Network for Influenza Program

Inovio Biomedical Corporation (NYSE Amex:INO), a leader in DNA vaccine design, development and delivery, announced today it has entered into a research collaboration agreement with the National Institutes of Health (NIH)’s Vaccine Research Center (VRC) to develop influenza vaccines. Under the agreement, the VRC and Inovio will pool technologies to develop universal influenza vaccines as well as rapidly advance development of vaccine candidates targeting the emerging pandemic 2009 H1N1 swine flu strains.

Inovio has established strong collaborative relationships with some of the world’s top academic and research institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania and National Microbiology Laboratory of the Public Health Agency of Canada, to leverage the company’s R&D resources to develop universal flu vaccine programs. In these studies with the VRC, electroporation-based delivery of novel DNA vaccines against influenza will be tested in pre-clinical animal studies to measure immune and protective responses. Inovio will provide electroporation devices and procedures based on its proprietary intradermal electroporation technology. Inovio and the VRC will provide DNA vaccine plasmids encoding influenza antigens. Challenge studies in animal models and immunological analyses will be performed at the VRC; both Inovio and the VRC will evaluate the results. Successful completion of the pre-clinical evaluation may lead to selection of vaccine candidates for further clinical development.

The challenge of current vaccine technology is the inability to create influenza vaccines that can protect against new, unmatched strains that may subsequently emerge – this limitation is highlighted by the inability of existing seasonal influenza vaccines to protect against the present swine origin influenza A/H1N1 and recognition that the necessary development and manufacturing period to produce a strain-specific vaccine is long enough to enable such an influenza virus to quickly spread. Inovio’s focus in its influenza programs is to develop universal influenza vaccines able to provide broader protective capabilities against perpetually emerging new strains. The company previously reported data from prior and ongoing pre-clinical studies in pig models in which the SynCon™ based H1N1 vaccines achieved hemagglutination inhibition (HI) titers above the protection threshold in 100% of the vaccinated animals against different strains of influenza virus, including an existing swine influenza virus (A/Iowa/35233/1999) and a currently circulating swine influenza A/H1N1 virus (Swine A/Mexico/InDRE4487/2009).