Plymouth Meeting’s Inovio Pharmaceuticals Gets Positive Results from Ebola Vaccine

Plymouth Meeting-based Inovio Pharmaceuticals Inc. recently reported positive results from early-stage testing of its experimental Ebola vaccine, writes John George of the Philadelphia Business Journal.

The company’s phase-I clinical trial results came a day after the World Health Organization declared the Ebola outbreak that began in West Africa is no longer a public health emergency of international concern.

That doesn’t mean work on vaccines and treatments for future outbreaks will stop.

WHO said about 11,320 people – mostly living in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia – died during the epidemic that began in March 2014.

Inovio led a consortium of biopharmaceutical firms and researchers who were awarded $45 million by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2015 to take a multi-faceted approach to prevent and treat Ebola infection.

The phase-I study found Inovio’s Ebola vaccine, called INO-4212, was safe, tolerable, and generated strong T cell and antibody responses in 75 healthy subjects.

“These initial data from our Ebola DNA vaccine represent just a first step in this DARPA-funded program,” said Dr. J. Joseph Kim, president and CEO of Inovio. “We look forward to rapidly moving this DNA vaccine into larger human studies on the path to product licensure.”

Click here to read more about Inovio Pharmaceuticals.