Needle-free, Contactless Electroporation Technology for DNA Vaccine Delivery

Inovio Pharmaceuticals Unveils Needle-free, Contactless Electroporation Technology for DNA Vaccine Delivery

Preclinical study demonstrating robust, sustained immune responses with non-invasive delivery device featured in journal Human Vaccines

BLUE BELL, Pa., Feb. 7, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Inovio Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NYSE Amex: INO), a leader in the development of therapeutic and preventive vaccines against cancers and infectious diseases, announced today that its new generation DNA vaccine delivery technology, which provides the powerful enabling capabilities of electroporation without contacting the skin, is highlighted in a paper published in the scientific journal Human Vaccines. While current Inovio electroporation devices have been shown to be safe and well-tolerated in multiple human studies, Inovio has been advancing research to achieve the most optimal device characteristics to facilitate mass vaccinations.

Dr. J. Joseph Kim, Inovio's president and CEO, said, "Inovio continues to raise the bar in terms of technological innovation that will further optimize electroporation-based delivery of DNA-based therapeutics and vaccines for patients of all ages. While still enabling levels of vaccine potency that we have observed with our existing electroporation devices, this new contactless delivery method is non-invasive and amenable to the design of devices that are low-cost, portable, and extremely easy to use."

Dr. J. Joseph Kim CEO of the Year

CEO of the Year is J. Joseph Kim | president, co-founder and CEO | Inovio Pharmaceuticals

Here are several snippets from Philadelphia Business Journal:

In just 10 years, Dr. J. Joseph Kim has built his business from a startup vaccine development business in the University City Science Center incubator into a publicly traded company with 40 employees in Blue Bell.

While the young company, originally known as Viral Genomix, was in the incubator, Kim and his co-founder Dr. David Weiner began pre-clinical development of a class of drugs for treatment of HIV, cancer and inflammatory diseases using intellectual property they licensed from the University of Pennsylvania. Their progress enabled them to successfully raise $40 million and bring the company out of incubation within four years.

Dr. Joseph Kim on biomedical innovation and entrepreneurship

I can't take any credit here. Sometimes I like to blog about my namesake since I have such a common name. Joseph Kim is a very common name.

Well, Dr. J. Joseph Kim, the CEO of Inovio, spoke at Thunderbird about his remarkable entrepreneurial story. I hope that someday I may also have an entrepreneurial story to tell.

Dr. Kim primarily spoke about vaccine technology and DNA vaccines. He also shared some of his views on entrepreneurship:

• The importance of trust in business, especially in new ventures. How successful entrepreneurs surround themselves with people they trust and who don’t need to be monitored and controlled (”he’s running out of friends to hire”)
• The importance of a quality education (MIT and Penn in his case) not only as a source of knowledge, but as a source of mentors and friends
• The intrinsic value of failure in entrepreneurship. The odds are always against the entrepreneur. For every successful venture there may be dozen failures. And every successful entrepreneur has learned to deal with failure and use failure as learning
• How he’s main drive as an entrepreneur is to “have an impact”. One needs not be ashamed of profits. Profits drive business, and without business there would not be much technological progress (governments and NGOs have not proven too effective at producing new technologies and drugs). But at the end of the day, it is the passion for the product, the innovation, and the impact one has in the world that must drive the entrepreneur.
• Business leaders need to ask themselves whether the world would be any different if their business didn’t exist. If the answer is no, they’d better think about doing something else.

To read the full story on the Thunderbird website, click here.

EmTech@MIT 2009

I wish I could be there. Some really exciting discussions will take place this year at EmTech (Emerging Technologies) at MIT. Maybe I'll get a chance to go next year and cover the meeting as a blogger.

As always, some of the topics this year revolve around healthcare issues and the world of biotechnology and medical advances. One of the hot topics revolves around the DNA-based universal flu vaccine. Technology Review has written a story about this novel concept. Dr. J. Joseph Kim and his team at Inovio are working on this vaccine technology and I'm eager to see it on the market.

I sure miss Boston and those MIT days. It's just not the same when you're watching a webcast from home.

Dr. Joseph Kim in the news

My name is so common that you may think that it appears in the news all the time. The truth is that I don't see my name appearing too often. Without the "Dr." or "M.D." the name "Joe Kim" or "Joseph Kim" is ubiquitous. When I was in college, I knew 3 other people in my social network who shared my name.

Let's talk about "Joseph Kim" in the news (and yes, this will be medically relevant):

• There's a young golfer named Joseph Kim (age 21) who may end up becoming really popular someday. He's not a doctor yet, but maybe he'll aspire to become one someday.
  
• Then there's J. Joseph Kim, PhD (CEO of Inovio Biomedical Corporation) who's working on a swine flu (H1N1) vaccine and you'll be seeing his name all over the Internet. Like me, he's an MIT alum.
  
• S. Joseph Kim, MD (Division of Nephrology, Toronto General Hospital, University Health Network, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario) recently published an article in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology titled, "H-Y Incompatibility Predicts Short-Term Outcomes for Kidney Transplant Recipients."
• Finally, Joseph Kim, MD (a cancer specialist and surgeon at the City of Hope medical center) has been in the news for treating Steve Jobs (pancreatic cancer).

That's quite a list of some very accomplished people!

Inovio Biomedical H1N1 DNA Vaccines

Here's an interesting heading: "Inovio Biomedical H1N1 Influenza DNA Vaccines Demonstrate 100% Responses Against Swine Flu in Vaccinated Pigs." I realize that we're not pigs, but this vaccine may be quite effective in humans too. Here are some interesting bits from a recent press release:

Dr. Niranjan Sardesai, Senior VP, Research & Development, presented the data at the Annual Conference of DNA Vaccines in Asia 2009 held in Beijing, China, July 9-10, 2009, in a presentation entitled, “Pandemic and Seasonal Influenza DNA Vaccines Delivered Via Electroporation.”

Dr. J. Joseph Kim, Inovio’s CEO, said, “Our innovative SynCon™ technology has the potential to protect people from influenza strains not exactly like the ones that make up the existing vaccines. This is a clear advantage for our universal flu program over conventional influenza vaccines. We are pleased to report our H1N1 preclinical results using pigs, a more natural model for the current influenza pandemic. We look forward to advancing our SynCon™ universal flu vaccine program toward clinical investigation.”

In this study, scientists immunized pigs with consensus H1N1 influenza DNA vaccine candidates on day 0, day 14, and day 28. Sera collected on day 28 and day 42, after two or three doses of vaccine, respectively, showed hemagglutination inhibition (HI) titers above the protection threshold in 100% of the vaccinated animals against a swine H1N1 virus previously isolated from pigs. On-going additional animal studies are testing the ability of Inovio’s SynCon™ human H1N1 and swine H1N1 based vaccines to cross-protect from currently circulating human and swine H1N1 viruses as well as the new influenza A/H1N1 of swine origin.

In a similar collaborative study with scientists from the National Microbiology Laboratory of the Public Health Agency of Canada and the University of Pennsylvania, Inovio previously demonstrated that mice immunized with Inovio’s SynCon™ H1N1 DNA vaccine provided 100% protection in a lethal challenge study against an unmatched H1N1 virus that caused the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed over 40 million people worldwide.

Inovio’s novel SynCon™ technology enables the company to design DNA-based vaccines with the potential to protect against unmatched sub-types and strains of pathogens. Inovio has created SynCon™ DNA vaccines based on influenza HA, NA, and NP proteins that are common to strains H1N1, H2N2, H3N2, and H5N1, which make up the majority of seasonal and pandemic influenza. Using a designer approach, Inovio can formulate these DNA plasmids together to rapidly develop a universal influenza vaccine potentially targeting all these strains. The resulting vaccine could target seasonal as well as pandemic-potential influenza strains such as avian influenza and swine flu, which has already been designated pandemic status. Significantly, being based on a common set of antigens derived from a broad range of flu strains, such a universal vaccine would have the potential to provide greater protection against evolving, unmatched flu strains.

The fall is quickly approaching. Let's hope that we have enough H1N1 vaccine to go around the world so that we don't suffer mass fatalities from this swine flu pandemic.

Inovio developing a swine flu vaccine

Inovio is developing a swine flu vaccine. Here's the headline: "Inovio Biomedical, National Microbiology Laboratory, and University of Pennsylvania to Evaluate Candidate DNA Vaccines Against “Swine” Influenza A (H1N1)"

Inovio has established a new collaboration with the National Microbiology Laboratory of the Public Health Agency of Canada and the University of Pennsylvania to further evaluate Inovio DNA vaccine candidates against swine influenza A (H1N1) virus. Dr. J. Joseph Kim (no, that's not me), Inovio’s CEO, stated, “The current swine flu outbreak highlights the fact that the world cannot rely solely on the “catch-up” strategy of influenza vaccine design. We need vaccines that provide at least some broad protective capability against evolving seasonal influenza strains and those with pandemic potential. We have already achieved significant validating data in large animal models regarding the ability of Inovio’s consensus vaccines to protect against unmatched strains of different influenza sub-types and look forward to the data resulting from this collaboration of vaccine experts.”

Inovio Biomedical Closes Merger with VGX Pharmaceuticals

We are living in an era of some significant mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Inovio Biomedical closed their merger with VGX Pharmaceuticals, where Dr. J. Joseph Kim (also an MIT alum) will be transitioning from the CEO of VGX Pharmaceuticals to the new CEO and director of Inovio Biomedical. He was recently quoted as saying, “Better vaccine design and delivery are two critical requirements to achieving breakthroughs for this new generation of vaccines. Inovio today has world-class DNA vaccine expertise and technology, with leading competencies in these areas. With compelling preclinical data and encouraging proof-of-principle data from human studies already in hand, we are optimistic about Inovio’s potential to achieve additional clinical results that will highlight the company’s leadership in DNA vaccine development.”

Inovio's senior management team will now consist of:

• J. Joseph Kim, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer and Director
• Avtar S. Dhillon, M.D., President and Chairman of the Board
• Peter D. Kies, Chief Financial Officer
• C. Jo White, M.D., Chief Medical Officer
• Niranjan Y. Sardesai, Ph.D., Senior VP, Research and Development
• Kevin W. Rassas, Senior VP, Business Development

I wonder if Inovio Biomedical will be one of the first companies to develop a novel vaccine against the swine flu.

VGX and Swine Flu Vaccines

John Gorge writes in his Philadelphia Business Journal healthcare blog about Joseph Kim. No, not me, but another Joseph Kim. Dr. J. Joseph Kim is the CEO of VGX Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology company that uses some novel approaches to vaccine development. Dr. Kim also happens to be an MIT alumni, so we do share a few things in common. Like me, he has a strong passion for medical technology. That's what his company is about. He uses electroporation technology to develop DNA-based vaccines and it sounds like they're eager to work on a swine flu vaccine.

It sounds like VGX is merging with Inovio Biomedical Corp. of San Diego and they will operate as VGX.