Inovio Pharmaceuticals (INO) is an American biotechnology company focused on the discovery, development, and commercialization of COVID-19 products and infectious diseases.
Today marks a new milestone for INO stock. The company has acquired a $71 million dollar contract from the U.S. Department of Defense to scale up manufacture of CELLECTRA® 3PSP Smart Device and Procurement of CELLECTRA® 2000 for COVID-19 DNA Vaccine.
Inovio Pharmaceuticals (INO) gets $71 million from Department of Defense for COVID-19 Vaccine
The DoD contract, from the JPEO-CRBND-EB through funding provided by the Defense Health Program, builds upon two separate prior $5 million grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), to accelerate the testing of CELLECTRA® 3PSP. Initial development of this next generation CELLECTRA® 3PSP smart device began in 2019 with $8.1 million in funding from the medical arm of the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s Medical CBRN Defense Consortium.
Dr. J. Joseph Kim, INOVIO’s President and CEO, said, “INOVIO is very pleased to receive this significant funding from the U.S. Department of Defense to continue our rapid scale-up capacity for our breakthrough DNA medicines delivery device CELLECTRA®. We look forward to working closely with DoD, JPEO-CBRND and JPL-CBRND-EB to provide much needed protection to DoD personnel and their families through development of a safe and effective vaccine against COVID-19. This next generation smart device leverages the efficacy delivery and safety track record of an earlier version that has received CE mark certification and has been used in clinical trials to safely dose more than 2,000 patients in over 7,000 administrations of INOVIO’s DNA medicines. The current DoD contract further supports INOVIO’s large-scale production of devices and arrays to deliver potentially hundreds of millions of doses of INO-4800 next year to combat the global COVID-19 pandemic.”
CELLECTRA® 3PSP is a small, portable, hand-held, user-friendly device that runs on “AA” batteries. The device is designed to function reliably in challenging environments and can be stockpiled in large quantities without maintenance, characteristics that are critical in a pandemic situation. INOVIO’s San Diego device manufacturing facility has produced initial quantities of the device, while also showing that the design and scale-up of the manufacturing processes can be transferred to contract manufacturers in order to further increase supply.
