Inovio Pharmaceuticals, Inc. a leader in the development of therapeutic and preventive vaccines against cancers and infectious diseases, announced that it has signed an agreement with OncoSec Medical Inc. providing for the sale to OncoSec of certain non-DNA vaccine technology and intellectual property relating to electroporation technology useful for electrochemical and cytokine based immune therapies for treating solid tumours.
OncoSec will pay Inovio an undisclosed purchase price for the assigned assets and cash fees and a royalty on commercial product sales.
Dr J Joseph Kim, Inovio's president and CEO, said: “As Inovio advances its leadership in the DNA vaccine field with several phase II clinical studies for cervical dysplasia, leukaemia, and hepatitis C virus therapies, we are pleased to enable third parties to commit their focus and resources to achieve the commercial potential of Inovio's non-DNA vaccine assets. Prior clinical testing of our selective electrochemical tumour treatment and cytokine cancer therapies produced promising results and we are excited to monetize this electroporation asset for these applications and see its advancement by OncoSec. We wish the company every success in this endeavour.”
Punit Dhillon, OncoSec's president and CEO, said: “We are excited to conclude this agreement with Inovio to acquire this promising technology for locally targeted cancer treatments, which have previously achieved important clinical outcomes, and immediately begin the implementation of our clinical development and commercialization plan. There are millions of people in the US alone who face detrimental cosmetic, functional and pain outcomes resulting from the invasive treatments used today for various skin and other cancers - in addition, the nature of current treatments results in high treatment and post-treatment costs to the medical system.”
The electroporation technology being sold and licensed to OncoSec is based on Inovio's industry-leading electroporation technology platform that, in addition to DNA vaccines and immune therapeutics, can also be used to efficiently deliver a chemotherapeutic or cytokine agent for the treatment of cancer. When these chemotherapeutic or cytokine agents are injected into a selected treatment area such as a tumour and the predominantly healthy tissue in the margin surrounding a tumour, they have been shown to selectively and quickly destroy the tumour and cancer cells in the tumour margin. These agents act by directly killing cancerous cells at the delivery site.
OncoSec designs, develops and commercializes innovative and proprietary medical approaches to treat solid tumour cancers with unmet medical needs or where currently approved therapies are inadequate based on their efficacy level or side effect profile.
Inovio is developing a new generation of vaccines, called DNA vaccines, to treat and prevent cancers and infectious diseases. These SynCon vaccines are designed to provide broad cross-strain protection against known as well as newly emergent strains of pathogens such as influenza.