OncoSec Medical Inc. (OTC Bulletin Board: ONCSD), a developer of innovative and proprietary medical approaches to treat solid tumor cancers with unmet medical needs, announced today that it has signed an agreement with Inovio Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NYSE Amex: INO) providing for the purchase by OncoSec of certain non-DNA vaccine technology and intellectual property relating to electroporation technology useful for electrochemical and cytokine based immune therapies for treating solid tumors. OncoSec will pay Inovio an undisclosed purchase price for the assigned assets and cash fees and a royalty on commercial product sales.
Dr. J. Joseph Kim, Inovio's president and CEO, said: "As Inovio advances its leadership in the DNA vaccine field with several Phase II clinical studies for cervical dysplasia, leukemia, and hepatitis C virus therapies, we are pleased to enable third parties to commit their focus and resources to achieve the commercial potential of Inovio's non-DNA vaccine assets. Prior clinical testing of our selective electrochemical tumor treatment and cytokine cancer therapies produced promising results and we are excited to monetize this electroporation asset for these applications and see its advancement by OncoSec. We wish the company every success in this endeavor."
Mr. Punit Dhillon, OncoSec's president and CEO, said: "We are excited to conclude this agreement with Inovio to acquire this promising technology for locally targeted cancer treatments, which have previously achieved important clinical outcomes, and immediately begin the implementation of our clinical development and commercialization plan. There are millions of people in the US alone who face detrimental cosmetic, functional and pain outcomes resulting from the invasive treatments used today for various skin and other cancers – in addition, the nature of current treatments results in high treatment and post-treatment costs to the medical system."
The electroporation technology being sold and licensed to OncoSec is based on Inovio's industry-leading electroporation technology platform that, in addition to DNA vaccines and immune therapeutics, can also be used to efficiently deliver a chemotherapeutic or cytokine agent for the treatment of cancer. When these chemotherapeutic or cytokine agents are injected into a selected treatment area such as a tumor and the predominantly healthy tissue in the margin surrounding a tumor, they have been shown to selectively and quickly destroy the tumor and cancer cells in the tumor margin. The chemotherapeutic agent acts by directly killing cancerous cells at the delivery site. Cytokine agents act by inducing broad, non-antigen specific immune responses that have been shown to kill cancerous cells. These therapies enable heightened concentrations of medicine to be directed to the cancer while reducing overall dosage and moderating or eliminating side effects associated with systemically-applied therapeutic approaches. This optimized delivery is enabled by Inovio's proprietary electroporation process, which locally applies brief controlled electrical pulses to cells to temporarily and reversibly increase permeability of the cell membranes in selected tissue and dramatically increase cellular uptake of the previously injected agent as seen in previous animal studies and earlier human clinical trials.
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