Inovio Pharmaceuticals is once again put in the spotlight as they are currently in the process of successfully developing a DNA-based vaccine that can treat or prevent the HIV virus. So far, the results obtained have shown that the vaccine had elicited high T-cell and antibody immune responses in healthy and uninfected adults. This came after Plymouth Meeting biotech's stock has significantly increased last Wednesday, following an announcement that Inovio's HIV vaccine, the Pennvax-GP, has yielded a nearly 100 percent immune response in volunteers.

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Study Results

As per Joseph Kim, Inovio's president and CEO, the figures obtained from the study are considerably one of the highest responses ever seen with an HIV vaccine. Concurrently, the company has claimed that a similar scenario of an almost hundred percent of immune response rates with its vaccines for Ebola, Zika, and MERS have also been observed. That said, it was found that Inovio's HIV vaccine has been funded by a National Institutes of Health grant that was presented during a meeting of the HIV Vaccine Trials Network in Washington.

Further Studies Required

Meanwhile, in the next six years or so, the company believes that they would be able to complete the pivotal study, which would eventually enroll approximately 400 subjects. Inovio's HIV vaccine, however, needs to be studied further in order to determine whether Pennvax-GP can safely and effectively prevent HIV infection, Benzinga reports. As of the press time, it turns out that Inovio Pharma has quickly gone down to 8.81 percent at $7.92 after jumping roughly 22 percent on Wednesday in reaction to the results of the study.

Ultimately, through the upcoming collaboration with the University of California San Francisco, experts will be administering the vaccine in HIV-positive patients. The firm has recently announced that this move is to see whether Inovio's HIV vaccine could really generate killer T-cells in the body's immune system to attack the HIV virus.