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Investors buying Inovio stock today are probably aware that the SEC doesn't make decisions based on the tweets of short-sellers. The underlying factor driving Inovio's shares up by more than 130% year to date is the biotech's progress with its experimental vaccine for the novel coronavirus disease COVID-19.
Inovio announced on March 3 that it's accelerating the timeline for advancing its INO-4800 vaccine to an early-stage clinical study in humans. That study is expected to begin in April. Inovio also said that it plans to produce 1 million doses of the vaccine by the end of 2020.
There's no guarantee that Inovio's clinical study evaluating INO-4800 will be successful. But it's also too early to dismiss the company's chances. Inovio has previous experience in developing vaccines for viruses, including MERS, a member of the coronavirus family.
We'll have to wait and see whether Inovio's COVID-19 vaccine shows promise in early clinical testing. But while the biotech stock's near-term fortunes rest on how well this testing goes, Inovio does have other irons in the fire. Most importantly, the company expects to announce results later this year from a late-stage study of VGX-3100 in treating cervical high-grade squamous intraepithelial lesions (HSIL) caused by human papillomavirus (HPV).
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