PLYMOUTH MEETING, Pa.,
Jan. 3, 2019 /PRNewswire/
-- Inovio Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: INO) today announced
that Mr. Simon X. Benito, former
Merck Vaccines executive, has been appointed Chairman of Inovio's
Board of Directors, replacing Dr. Avtar
Dhillon who is retiring from the Board after 10 years of
service. Dr. Dhillon was initially appointed as Chairman of the
Board in 2009 in conjunction with the merger between Inovio
Biomedical and VGX Pharmaceuticals with a mandate to provide
continuity and strategic guidance during its integration. Effective
immediately, Mr. Benito will assume the role of Chairman.
In addition to the appointment of Mr. Benito, Inovio welcomes
Ms. Lota Zoth to the company's Board of Directors.
Dr. J. Joseph Kim, Inovio's
President and CEO, said, "Our Board has played a critical role in
our success and that will continue with Simon Benito as our Chairman. For more than 15
years, he has brought to our Board many years of business
experience in the pharmaceutical industry, formal accounting and
financial expertise, significant public company board experience,
and important industry contacts. We also welcome Lota Zoth, an
experienced financial executive, who has a 35-year track record of
helping public and private companies to sustainable growth and
innovation through financings, acquisitions, and strategic
planning."
"Finally, with gratitude we thank Avtar
Dhillon, Board Chairman since 2009, for his total of 17
years of dedicated service to Inovio. Avtar provided strong
leadership especially during the integration and build-up after the
merger of Inovio Biomedical and VGX that led to the formation of
Inovio Pharmaceuticals in 2009."
Lota Zoth has held senior financial roles in a variety of
commercial-stage companies, including serving as MedImmune's chief
financial officer. Prior to joining MedImmune, Ms. Zoth served in
financial executive roles with PSINet Inc., Sodexho Marriott
Services, Inc., Marriott International and PepsiCo, Inc. Ms. Zoth
was also an auditor at Ernst & Young, LLP and is a Certified
Public Accountant. She has experience of serving on the board of
multiple public companies in the biopharmaceutical industry,
including Spark Therapeutics currently.
Simon Benito, a Director of
Inovio since 2003, previously held various leadership positions at
Merck & Co. including senior vice president of Merck Vaccine
Division and vice president of Merck Human Health for Japan. Mr. Benito also served as executive
vice president of Merck-Medco Managed Care.
About Inovio Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Inovio is a late-stage biotechnology company focused on the
discovery, development, and commercialization of DNA
immunotherapies that transform the treatment of cancer and
infectious diseases. Inovio's proprietary platform technology
applies next-generation antigen sequencing and DNA delivery to
activate potent immune responses to targeted diseases. The
technology functions exclusively in vivo, and has been demonstrated
to consistently activate robust and fully functional T cell and
antibody responses against targeted cancers and pathogens.
Inovio is the only immunotherapy company that has reported
generating T cells whose killing capacity correlates with relevant
clinical outcomes. Inovio's most advanced clinical program,
VGX-3100, is in Phase 3 for the treatment of HPV-related cervical
pre-cancer. Also in development are Phase 2 immuno-oncology
programs targeting head and neck cancer, bladder cancer, and
glioblastoma, as well as platform development programs in hepatitis
B, Zika, Ebola, MERS, and HIV. Partners and collaborators
include MedImmune, Regeneron, Roche/Genentech, ApolloBio
Corporation, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Wistar
Institute, University of Pennsylvania,
Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, CEPI, DARPA, GeneOne
Life Science, Plumbline Life Sciences, 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.
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 us or our collaborators, including
alternatives that may be more efficacious or cost effective than
any therapy or treatment that we and our collaborators hope to
develop, issues involving product liability, issues involving
patents and whether they or licenses to them will provide us 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 we can finance or devote other
significant resources that may be necessary to prosecute, protect
or defend them, the level of corporate expenditures, assessments of
our 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, 2017, our Quarterly Report on Form
10-Q for the quarter ended September 30,
2018 and other regulatory filings we make from time to time.
There can be no assurance that any product candidate in our
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 we undertake no
obligation to update or revise these statements, except as may be
required by law.
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SOURCE Inovio Pharmaceuticals, Inc.