Inovio prices $65m senior notes offering

Inovio Pharmaceuticals (NSDQ:INO) said today that it priced an offering of $65 million of 6.5% convertible senior notes due 2024.

The Plymouth Meeting, Penn.-based company also gave initial purchasers a 13-day option to buy up to an additional $20 million in notes.

Inovio expects to reel in roughly $62.7 million in net proceeds from the offering – or $82.1 million if the initial purchasers exercise their option to buy additional notes. The company is slated to use its newly-acquired funds to support clinical trials, R&D and manufacturing.

Earlier this year, Inovio touted that a second patient with HPV-related head and neck cancer was treated with its synthetic DNA vaccine and achieved full remission after subsequent treatment with a PD-1 checkpoint inhibitor.

“Achieving sustained complete responses with immunotherapy in metastatic cancer patients is what you hope for with novel cancer treatments. The fact that the treatment with our synthetic DNA vaccine followed with two different PD-1 inhibitors in this HPV-related cancer patient population showed a complete response in 2 out of 4 progressors is very encouraging as the best complete response rate by PD-1 inhibitors as a monotherapy in metastatic head and neck cancer is approximately 4%,” president & CEO Dr. J. Joseph Kim said in prepared remarks.

“While additional data from Phase 2 clinical studies will provide more insights to the power of synthetic DNA vaccine, this newly reported data provides additional validation for Inovio’s overall cancer combination strategy using a T cell activator combined with a checkpoint inhibitor against an array of cancers with big pharma partners providing various checkpoint inhibitors,” Kim added.

In October last year, Inovio reported that its synthetic HIV vaccine demonstrated durable antibody and T cell immune responses in a Phase I trial.

The company found that Pennvax-GP plasmids delivered intradermally with Inovio’s Cellectra device triggered equivalent or superior immune responses in healthy volunteers compared to intramuscular delivery of the plasmids using the same device.

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