Thursday, April 28, 2016
Inovio Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Is teaming up with the National Cancer Institute and the Mayo Clinic to test its experimental immunotherapy as a potential treatment for hepatitis C.
The Plymouth Meeting, Pa., biopharmaceutical company's new drug candidate, called INO-8000, will be evaluated in a phase-I clinical trial involving patients who are in the early stages of chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection.
Immuntherapies are treatments designed to boost the ability of a person's own immune system to fight disease.
Dr. J. Joseph Kim, Inovio's president and CEO, said, “Despite recent treatment advances, HCV infection remains a burden on our health care and payor system and continues to spread. Today’s expensive drugs are highly effective in treating HCV but are not available to the majority of infected individuals. We are pleased to join the NCI and Mayo Clinic in this quest to develop an alternative medical solution to fight this disease, which remains one of the fastest-developing markets in healthcare.
According to the NCI, among people initially infected with HCV, 75 to 85 percent will go on to develop chronic illness. More than 170 million people around the world are chronically infected with the hepatitis C virus.
The Centers for Disease Control estimates 3.5 million people in the United States are chronically infected HCV, about 20,000 new cases of chronic HCV were reported last year, and about 15,000 people in this country die each year of HCV-related causes.
Dr. Jeffrey Jacobson, a, professor of medicine and neurobiology at The Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University, will serve as Inovio study’s principal investigator.
The Inovio (NASDAQ: INO) study is being funded by the National Cancer Institute’s Division of Cancer Prevention. It will be conducted at the Mayo Clinic and other U.S. sites.
Source : bizjournals.com
