Inovio Pharmacueticals (INO), a small Pennsylvania pharmaceutical company conducting human trials for a coronavirus vaccine plans to complete recruitment of dozens of volunteers in the next week.
Inovio Pharmaceuticals, one of three companies with vaccine clinical trials underway, began screening potential participants at a medical center in Kansas City, Missouri.
We expect to finish enrollment of all 40 volunteers before the end of April
Inovio became the second U.S. biotech firm to launch a Covid-19 vaccine phase one study. Inovio’s study began in early April at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine and the Center for Pharmaceutical Research in Kansas City, Missouri, after it received Food and Drug Administration clearance. Inovio said it would give volunteers two doses of INO-4800 four weeks apart. The company expects to receive initial data from the trials in late summer.
China’s CanSino Biological is the only company with a candidate vaccine in phase two trials.
“It helps that [the University of Pennsylvania is] my alma mater and we’ve done collaborative work over the years,” Kim said. “Phase two and beyond we want to leverage some of the private institutions, like the University of Pennsylvania.”
Inovio’s study is backed by a $5 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other funding from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI, and the Department of Defense.
What’s up with Inovio Pharmaceuticals (INO)?
Investors are hopeful that Inovio will make a fortune off of its investigational COVID-19. However, the biotech company remains a risky bet. Inovio has no approved products on the market, and there’s no guarantee that its potential vaccine for COVID-19 will ever earn regulatory approval, much less that it will be the only one to do so. In short, betting that Inovio’s current efforts to develop a COVID-19 vaccine will pan out is, at this point, a long shot.
