Here's Why Inovio Pharmaceuticals Stock Rocketed Higher Today
Shares of Inovio Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: INO) are skyrocketing today, up by 20% as of 12:59 p.m. EST, after Fox Business reported that the biotech has discovered a vaccine for the novel coronavirus that has sickened more than 45,000 people around the globe and killed more than 1,100. The company hopes to start a phase 1 clinical trial as early as this summer.
Inovio was reportedly able to develop the vaccine in about three hours after it obtained the DNA sequence of the virus. Rather than giving the patient attenuated virus like most vaccines, Inovio's technology uses DNA to express viral proteins in the patients' cells, which causes the immune system to develop antibodies to the virus.
All the biotech really needed was the sequence of the COVID-19 virus and a good guess as to which viral protein was likely to create an immune response. The latter was probably helped by the fact that Inovio had already developed a vaccine for a different coronavirus that causes Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), so researchers likely knew which protein would be immunogenic.
Source Fool.com
