Inovio Biomedical Corporation, a leader in DNA vaccine design, development and delivery, and the HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN) announced the initiation of a phase-I clinical study of Inovio's Pennvax-B preventive DNA vaccine delivered using its proprietary electroporation technology. The multi-centre study will be conducted at several HVTN clinical sites under a protocol designated HVTN-080.

The study will enrol healthy volunteers to assess the safety of and immune responses to this DNA-based vaccine delivered via in vivo electroporation. Inovio previously reported data from non-human primates demonstrating up to a 100-fold enhancement in immune responses resulting from the vaccine when delivered via in vivo electroporation compared to syringe injection without electroporation. Pennvax-B is currently in a clinical study, being conducted under the HVTN-070 protocol by the same group of collaborators, to test safety and immunogenicity of the vaccine delivered via intramuscular syringe injection without electroporation. The HVTN-080 follow-on study is sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), an NIH agency.

Dr J Joseph Kim, Inovio's president and CEO, said, "We are pleased to collaborate with the NIH and HVTN to test the SynCon Pennvax-B HIV vaccine delivered via electroporation. With our recently announced positive interim immunogenicity data from our clinical trial for our human papillomavirus/cervical cancer DNA vaccine using a similar technology approach, we are optimistic that electroporation delivery of Pennvax-B vaccine will demonstrate similar levels of safety and immunogenicity in this trial."

Inovio Biomedical is focused on the design, development, and delivery of a new generation of vaccines, called DNA vaccines, to prevent and treat cancers and infectious diseases.