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news.Inovio Pharmaceuticals and Roche have terminated their collaboration, option and license deal signed in 2013 to jointly develop INO-5150, Inovio's DNA immunotherapy targeting prostate cancer, as well as their research collaboration in prostate cancer.
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As part of this deal, all of Roche’s rights to INO-5150, including the right to license the product to other parties, will be returned to Inovio, which now plans to independently advance the immunotherapy into a Phase I clinical trial in the first half of 2015.
Under the existing license agreement, the two firms will continue to collaborate and co-develop Inovio’s DNA immunotherapy (INO-1800) against hepatitis B virus and enter Phase I trial in 2015.
Inovio president and CEO Dr Joseph Kim said: "The Inovio/Roche partnership will continue to thrive focusing on the development of INO-1800 for the treatment of hepatitis B.
"In addition to recently demonstrating clinical efficacy and the ability to induce potent antigen specific CD8+ T cell responses in our VGX-3100 phase II study, Inovio will be moving a broad portfolio of immuno-oncology products through development, including INO-3112 (head/neck and cervical cancers), INO-1400 (breast, lung and pancreatic cancers) and INO-5150 (prostate cancer).
"We believe that these products along with pre-phase III VGX-3100 will further our growth and represent opportunities for additional value-adding partnerships."
Inovio’s INO-5150 targets prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) and prostate-specific antigen (PSA).
The SynCon DNA vaccine for prostate cancer was designed with PSA and PSMA synthetic consensus immunogens based on human and macaque sequences, resulting in amino acid sequences that differ slightly from the native human protein.