IVI to fund development of Inovio's MERS vaccine

International Vaccine Institute (IVI) will provide new funding and support for the development of Inovio Pharmaceuticals’ MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) vaccine, GLS-5300. IVI is the world’s only international organization devoted exclusively to developing and introducing new and improved vaccines to protect the world’s poorest people, especially children in developing countries. 

Inovio is co-developing this vaccine with GeneOne Life Science. IVI will add technical, laboratory and financial support for GLS-5300 clinical trials in Korea.

Inovio, GeneOne and its academic collaborators have evaluated GLS-5300 in mice, rhesus macaques and camels. As published in Science Translational Medicine, the vaccine induced robust immune responses in all three species. GLS-5300 has been specifically able to induce 100 percent protection from a live virus challenge in a rhesus macaque non-human primate study. The results of the non-human primate study supported the conduct of the first phase I clinical trial of 75 healthy volunteers in collaboration with the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.

“This collaborative funding is part of a Won 41 billion ($ 34 million) grant publicly pledged in 2015 from the Samsung Foundation to IVI to support the development of a MERS vaccine for emergency use in Korea and internationally. The goal of this funding is to expand clinical testing of GLS-5300 toward emergency use authorisation by the Korean government as well as authorities of other countries. Inovio’s GLS-5300 remains the only vaccine for MERS in clinical testing. With this support from IVI, Inovio, GeneOne, and our other collaborators can expand GLS-5300 vaccine development in Korea and the US,” said Dr J Joseph Kim, Inovio’s president & CEO and a member of the board of trustees of IVI.

Despite the continuing threat of MERS outbreaks, there are no licensed vaccines or treatments for MERS. Since the virus was first identified in Saudi Arabia in 2012, the World Health Organization (WHO) reports almost 1,900 MERS infections and nearly 700 deaths worldwide. Twenty seven countries have reported cases, including Korea where an outbreak in the summer of 2015 resulted in 186 cases and 38 deaths. While a SARS epidemic in 2003 killed 10 percent of those infected, MERS has killed about 36 percent of people who contracted this communicable virus.