Inovio Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NYSE Amex: INO), a leader in the development of therapeutic and preventive vaccines against cancers and infectious diseases, announced today that Inovio Pharmaceuticals and the University of Pennsylvania have received a grant of $3.1 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director's Office to further fund Inovio's universal SynCon™ flu vaccine development.
“Complex research projects, even exceptionally high impact ones, are tough to get funded without the necessary resources to assemble teams and collect preliminary data. The TR01 awards provide a way for these high impact projects to be pursued”
Inovio's influenza vaccine aims to bypass current requirement for annual strain and subtype-specific influenza vaccines by developing a single vaccine to potentially protect against all strains within multiple targeted subtypes, such as H5N1 and H1N1, posing risk to humans. Inovio is already evaluating its SynCon H5N1 targeted vaccine (VGX-3400X) in a Phase I clinical study. This new award will be utilized to further develop a universal seasonal influenza vaccine. If successful, these SynCon vaccines could establish a new paradigm for flu vaccination.
The award is part of the "Director's Transformative Research Projects" from the Office of the NIH Director and the NIH's Common Fund, which supports bold research initiatives that have the potential to catapult medical science forward and speed the translation of research into improved health. The grants are designed to help innovators pursue high-impact medical innovations that no single NIH institute could tackle alone.
Dr. David B. Weiner, Professor of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and Chairman of Inovio's Scientific Advisory Board, will lead the research collaboration involving scientists from the University of Pennsylvania and Inovio. Inovio licensed the DNA vaccine technology from the university in 2007.
"Complex research projects, even exceptionally high impact ones, are tough to get funded without the necessary resources to assemble teams and collect preliminary data. The TR01 awards provide a way for these high impact projects to be pursued," said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D.
Dr. J. Joseph Kim, Inovio's CEO, said: "We are honored that the NIH Director's Office has chosen to support Inovio's SynCon DNA vaccine technology. It is imperative that the world achieve much broader protection against the constantly changing influenza virus. Our SynCon technology has already shown it can generate significant immune responses in humans, as recently reported with our therapeutic HPV DNA vaccine. Furthermore, our SynCon influenza vaccine candidates have demonstrated in animals the ability to generate broad protective immune responses against multiple unmatched strains. We look forward to advancing this research with the goal of achieving a universal influenza vaccine."
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