Inovio Biomedical Corporation (NYSE Amex: INO), a leader in DNA vaccine design, development and delivery, announced today that the company's SynCon™ Chikungunya virus DNA vaccine induced protective neutralizing antibody responses in a preclinical non-human primate model. Dr. David B. Weiner, Professor, University of Pennsylvania and Chairman, Inovio Scientific Advisory Board, discussed the data at the VACCINES EUROPE conference in Brussels, Belgium, in a presentation entitled, “Engineering DNA vaccine potency in vivo results in improved immunity: improving vaccine immunogenicity and efficacy.”
Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) is an emerging mosquito-borne alpha-virus native to tropical Africa and Asia. Attack rates (the cumulative incidence of infection in a group of people observed over a period of time) of up to 45% have been reported (WHO). While CHIKV is rarely life-threatening, it causes severe human morbidity. Acute illness is characterized by severe fever and debilitating joint pain, and recovery can take a year or longer. Recent evidence suggests that CHIKV can be transmitted by several types of mosquitos commonly found in developed countries, raising concerns about the spread of this pathogen outside its natural endemic areas to new regions including Europe and the United States.
There are no commercialized vaccines or therapeutics against CHIKV. In fact, very little is known about the basis for CHIKV-based disease, including the mechanism of immune-based viral clearance and the causes of clinical symptoms. Considering the potential for global spread of CHIKV, understanding the virus’s pathogenic mechanism and developing effective treatment options are paramount.
Inovio scientists used its proprietary SynCon™ approach to develop a universal CHIKV DNA vaccine. The candidate vaccine is delivered as a single DNA plasmid construct containing consensus sequences of key surface antigens. The universal CHIKV vaccine was designed by aligning numerous primary sequences of key surface antigens and choosing the most common amino acid or base pair at each site. In previous mice studies, Inovio scientists found that this universal vaccine induced protective neutralizing antibody responses and demonstrated protection from both death and illness in a challenge-protection model (published in Vaccine (2008) 26:5128).