Inovio Pharmaceuticals, a small biotech company working on a COVID-19 vaccine at its San Diego lab, said Tuesday that it has accelerated its timeline for early human trials in of its DNA-based drug.

The company expects to launch Phase 1 testing on roughly 30 to 50 healthy people in April, which is sooner than the June/July time frame that was previously expected.

The trial will take place at sites at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as Kansas City, Mo., and possibly other locations, said Kate Broderick, the San Diego-based Ph.D. and senior vice president of research and development for Inovio.

The company is working with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to approve the parameters of the accelerated trial, which aims to determine if the vaccine sparks the immune system to attack the virus.


“We’re looking for safety and what we call immunogenicity — the anti-bodies and t-cells and how they respond in people,” Broderick said.

Backed by a recent $9 million grant from a public-private partnership called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, Inovio engineered its vaccine based on its genetic sequence of COVID-19, which was published by health officials in China.

Of the 88,913 cases reported globally so far, 90 percent are in China, mostly in one province. Another 8,740 cases have been outside China, mostly in South Korea, Iran, Japan and Italy. More than 3,000 people have died globally.

In the U.S., more than 100 cases of COVID-19 have been reported so far, with nine deaths centered in the Seattle area.


Inovio is based near Philadelphia but operates its research facility in San Diego. It is one of several companies working to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. Others include Johnson & Johnson, Moderna and Gilead Sciences. Last week, Moderna said it had shipped a first batch of a potential vaccine to the U.S. government and hopes to start a human trial in less than two months.

Still, it likely to take up to a year or longer for a vaccine to clear the required regulatory review to be ready for the public.

Broderick said Inovio expects to get data readouts from the April study by summer, which it will use to apply for a larger, Phase 2 trial, which could involve thousands of people.

Inovio was able to jumpstart its COVID-19 efforts in part because it’s already in a Phase 2 trial for a vaccine for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. MERS also is a coronavirus but is a different strain than COVID-19.


Inovio Chief Executive Dr. J. Joseph Kim said after kicking off the initial human trial in the U.S. next month, the company plans to launch additional clinical trials soon thereafter in China and South Korea, where the outbreak is affecting the most people.

“We plan on delivering one million doses by year-end with existing resources and capacity,” said Kim in a statement. “However, we will need additional resources to scale up to make enough doses to help protect Americans from COVID-19 as well as to lead global efforts to curtail this virus.”

