New strategic position will guide product discovery anDr. Humeau will serve an integral role in advancing Inovio’s portfolio of ASPIRE immunotherapies and vaccinesd scientific collaborations.
PLYMOUTH MEETING, Pa., Dec. 11, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Inovio, (NASDAQ:INO) has promoted Dr. Laurent Humeau to Senior Vice President, Research & Development, reporting to Dr. J. Joseph Kim, Inovio’s President & CEO. Dr. Humeau joined Inovio in 2014 as Vice President, R&D.
Dr. Humeau will serve an integral role in advancing Inovio’s portfolio of ASPIRE™ (Antigen SPecific Immune REsponses) immunotherapies and vaccines covering multiple therapeutic cancers and infections, supporting clinical study opportunities, and fostering collaborations with academic partners. He will provide the technical and strategic leadership for Inovio’s highly productive R&D group whose activities include: preclinical development of immunotherapy and vaccine candidates, immunology and immune monitoring approaches, method development, product characterization, and analytical development. Under Dr. Humeau’s leadership in last 4 years, Inovio’s R&D group along with its collaborators published more than 50 peer-reviewed pre-clinical and clinical publications and dozens of new patent filings as well as receiving over $70 million in non-dilutive grants and contracts from DARPA, NIH, and the Gates Foundation in support of Inovio’s platform and vaccine development.
Dr. J. Joseph Kim, President and CEO, said, “As the chief scientist at Inovio, Laurent’s scientific expertise and his track record of executing our strategic plan make him well-deserving of this expanded role. Since he joined Inovio, he has strengthened our R&D discovery and development engine that is the foundation of our new products and academic collaborations.”
Prior to Inovio, Dr. Humeau served as a top R&D leader for several companies, including Chief Scientific Officer at VIRxSYS Corporation and Senior Director of Translational Research, Human Therapeutics Division for Intrexon. Dr. Humeau received his BS and MS in biology from the University Pierre & Marie Curie, Paris and a PhD in blood cell biology from the University Denis Diderot.
About Inovio Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Inovio is taking immunotherapy to the next level in the fight against cancer and infectious diseases. We are the only immunotherapy company that has reported generating T cells in vivo in high quantity that are fully functional and whose killing capacity correlates with relevant clinical outcomes with a favorable safety profile. With an expanding portfolio of immune therapies, the company is advancing a growing preclinical and clinical stage product pipeline. Partners and collaborators include MedImmune, Regeneron, Genentech, The Wistar Institute, University of Pennsylvania, DARPA, GeneOne Life Science, Plumbline Life Sciences, ApolloBio Corporation, Drexel University, NIH, HIV Vaccines Trial Network, National Cancer Institute, U.S. Military HIV Research Program, and Laval University. For more information, visit www.inovio.com.
This press release contains certain forward-looking statements relating to our business, including our plans to develop electroporation-based drug and gene delivery technologies and DNA vaccines, our expectations regarding our research and development programs, including the planned initiation and conduct of clinical trials and the availability and timing of data from those trials, and the sufficiency of our capital resources. Actual events or results may differ from the expectations set forth herein as a result of a number of factors, including uncertainties inherent in pre-clinical studies, clinical trials and product development programs, the availability of funding to support continuing research and studies in an effort to prove safety and efficacy of electroporation technology as a delivery mechanism or develop viable DNA vaccines, our ability to support our pipeline of SynCon® active immunotherapy and vaccine products, the ability of our collaborators to attain development and commercial milestones for products we license and product sales that will enable us to receive future payments and royalties, the adequacy of our capital resources, the availability or potential availability of alternative therapies or treatments for the conditions targeted by the company or its collaborators, including alternatives that may be more efficacious or cost effective than any therapy or treatment that the company and its collaborators hope to develop, issues involving product liability, issues involving patents and whether they or licenses to them will provide the company with meaningful protection from others using the covered technologies, whether such proprietary rights are enforceable or defensible or infringe or allegedly infringe on rights of others or can withstand claims of invalidity and whether the company can finance or devote other significant resources that may be necessary to prosecute, protect or defend them, the level of corporate expenditures, assessments of the company’s technology by potential corporate or other partners or collaborators, capital market conditions, the impact of government healthcare proposals and other factors set forth in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2016, our Form 10-Q for the period ended September 30, 2017, and other regulatory filings we make from time to time. There can be no assurance that any product candidate in Inovio’s pipeline will be successfully developed, manufactured or commercialized, that final results of clinical trials will be supportive of regulatory approvals required to market licensed products, or that any of the forward-looking information provided herein will be proven accurate. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this release, and Inovio undertakes no obligation to update or revise these statements, except as may be required by law.
CONTACTS:
Investors/Media: Jeff Richardson, Inovio Pharmaceuticals, 267-440-4211, jrichardson@inovio.com
