Plymouth Meeting-based Inovio Pharmaceuticals has filed a complaint with Pennsylvania state court alleging that a supplier is holding its experimental COVID-19 vaccine “hostage” by withholding some critical information needed to make it on a larger scale, write Cynthia Koons and Susan Decker for Bloomberg.

Inovio claims that its contract manufacturer, GeneOne Life Science and its VGXI unit, does not have the capacity to manufacture large quantities of the vaccine, but is refusing to provide the information that would let others do it.

The fight with the South Korea-based manufacturer comes at a critical time for Inovio. If the pharmaceutical company succeeds in developing a workable vaccine, it could find itself in the position where it needs to produce hundreds of millions of doses to meet worldwide demand.

And while VGXI has made enough doses for the clinical trials, it is now blocking Inovio’s efforts to prepare for ramped-up production in anticipation of regulatory approval.

“In this pandemic space things are not being done serially, we don’t wait until we have great efficacy data before we start to do large-scale manufacturing,” said Joseph Kim, Inovio’s chief executive. “We actually have to start that now.”

Read more about Inovio at Bloomberg by clicking here.

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