Summary
- Another multi-million dollar award from the U.S. Department of Defense validates Inovio's 21st century DNA technology.
- The DoD stake in Inovio's Smart devices signals a "smart" buy for investors.
- Inovio Pipeline Update: HPV.
On Tuesday, June 23, 2020, Inovio Pharmaceuticals (INO) announced that it had received a $71 million contract from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to scale up manufacturing of its CELLECTRA 3PSP smart devices, as well as the procurement of CELLECTRA 2000 for Inovio's COVID-19 DNA vaccine, INO-4800. This new award continues to strengthen and ensure the ongoing relationship between the United States Department of Defense and Inovio Pharmaceuticals, a relationship that dates back over the last several years.
Inovio CEO Dr. Joseph Kim added this regarding their upcoming work with the DoD,
We look forward to working closely with DoD, JPEO-CBRND and JPL-CBRND-EB to provide much needed protection to DoD personnel and their families through development of a safe and effective vaccine against COVID-19. This next generation smart device leverages the efficacy delivery and safety track record of an earlier version that has received CE mark certification and has been used in clinical trials to safely dose more than 2,000 patients in over 7,000 administrations of INOVIO's DNA medicines. The current DoD contract further supports INOVIO's large-scale production of devices and arrays to deliver potentially hundreds of millions of doses of INO-4800 next year to combat the global COVID-19 pandemic."
In my last article, "Inovio Pharmaceuticals: Positioning for a Global Opportunity", I wrote about the critical importance of this smart device for the effective delivery of Inovio's DNA vaccines. In essence, I reported that without this device, INO vaccines are essentially worthless and ineffective. Therefore, with the DoD granting an award to scale up manufacturing as well as procurement for these devices, it serves to validate and acknowledge the significance of the marriage between electroporation (EP) for the delivery of Inovio's DNA vaccines.
As a result of the DoD award, INO churned over 172M shares in volume for the day (a bit more than 110% of the entire float of outstanding shares), gained an additional 40% in SP appreciation and raised the market cap to $3.41B.
Source: Tradingview.com
A Smart Decision
So, what makes this investment by the DoD such a smart decision? I'll break this down into small parts so as to not lose the reader in the science of electroporation (EP) in order to illustrate the marriage between (EP) and the introduction of (DNA) into living cells and why the DoD gets it.
1. It all starts with identifying a sequence of the genetic code found in the disease target. Once the identification of a genetic sequence has been selected, the DNA plasmid (usually a circular ring of a harmless fragment of E Coli DNA), is encoded with only that portion of the sequence deemed safest to deliver an optimal response, hence the expression 'optimized DNA plasmid'.
