Coverage Initiated: July 2009

Invio Biomedical Corporation (AMEX:INO) was created as the merger of two DNA electroporation companies, VGX Pharmaceuticals in Blue Bell, PA and Invio Biomedical in the Sorrento Valley near San Diego, CA. This merger allows the patents and key scientists to be gathered under one flag. The company currently maintains its two locations although the headquarters is now in Pennsylvania. VGX’s CEO – Joseph Kim - is now the CEO of the combined entity.

DNA vaccines are amenable to relatively standard, scalable manufacturing. This contrasts with how current vaccines are manufactured. In vaccines for the prevention of viral infection, the organism is cultivated within eggs and then the virus is killed or weakened. Many things can go wrong in this complicated process, and it is not particularly scalable. The problem with DNA vaccines is the body's cellular machinery eats them up before they can generate immunity.

Inovio seeks to solve this problem through the use of electroporation, a technique used in plant geentic research and breeding for a long time. Electroporation in humans involves a few seconds of electrical pulses applied to a sub-cutaneous injection site. This increases the number of vaccine antigens that cross the cell membrane.

The company has promising data involving diseases that evade the immune system. All the current clinical candidates are in Phase I trials.

Electroporation is a proven method for efficiently getting DNA constructs into the cell. The question is, will it provide enough of an advantage to convince providers to hassle with an electronic vaccine device?

A complete listing of our research on Innovio is available by clicking here.