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news.Inovio Biomedical has signed an agreement with Swedish-based Tripep to develop a therapeutic vaccine for hepatitis C virus.
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The potential vaccine will be based on Tripep’s proprietary hepatitis C virus (HCV) antigen and delivered to infected individuals using Inovio’s medpulser DNA delivery system. Initiation of a phase I clinical trial is expected to begin in 2006 and will be performed in Sweden.
The terms of the development agreement call for each party to fund a portion of the phase I and subsequent phase II trials and share profit according to their contribution.
Inovio will initially get a 33% ownership in the overall product with the option to increase this to 50% after the completion of the phase I trial.
The US HCV market is currently calculated at $1.4 billion, representing 100,000 people treated each year. It is estimated that between 15 and 20 million people are chronically infected with HCV in the industrial world, translating to a worldwide hepatitis C treatment market of about $2.5 billion.
“The combination of Tripep’s ChronVac vaccine and Inovio’s medpulser DNA delivery system may become a completely new form of therapy for the treatment of chronic hepatitis C virus infection, a disease that can have a devastating impact on a large number of patients,” said Jan Nilsson, CEO of Tripep.